Wild Feather Necklace

For my last destash mission, I tackled some pretty little seed bead cubes. After making three cuff bracelets, and carefully choosing the best beads for the job, I was left with a small handful of cubes with very sharp edges. Though I was determined to use them all up, I didn’t want to stitch with these remainders. Whatever project they ended up in, it would have to involve single strands with seed beads between each cube to act as bumpers.

As soon as I had that image in mind, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with these cubes, right down to the colors. All I could see was an alternating pattern of turquoise cubes with red seed beads, and I couldn’t wait to get started. I played around with palettes/pattern combinations for awhile, and finally decided to just let the beads decide what colors would go where. All I had to do was pick a method.

I wanted a multi-strand necklace, and I wanted it to be easy to make. My last attempt at metal-free multi-strand without a complicated beadwork base was fairly successful, but I didn’t relish the idea of stringing thousands of seed beads onto a single thread. I decided to try a different approach that would work up much faster, with stronger results, and allow for a variety of different strand patterns.

Instead of working with a single continuous strand, I made several small ones until the beads ran out. Then all I had to do was gather them up with seed bead loops, anchored to some matching beadwork. Instead of spiral rope anchors, this time I used reverse daisy chain with the last of my black-and-white druks. I was able to mimic all of the opaque colors in the strands except for blue, and I actually prefer the omission.

My destash challenge is going to start getting a lot tougher from here on, since I’ve used up some of my favorite beads, and I’m left with a lot of miscellaneous focals and odd beads. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to top this necklace, which turned out to be so much more than the beads that it started with.

I can't help thinking that the combination of opaque colors and stripes resembles feathers from some kind of exotic game bird. I was so very tempted to call this necklace "Wild Turkey". What do you see?

Copyright 2012 Inspirational Beading
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