New Necklace and Earrings Featuring Faux Agate Flower Canes and Swinging Rings!

The necklace and earrings pictured above grew out of my desire to step out of my comfort zone in order to offer jewelry in a wider array of colors.  Purple and Turquoise are my favorites, so it is easy for me to create in those colors.  They can't be everyone's favorites, and since I do want to make jewelry that other people will want to wear, it is necessary to branch out and give equal time to other colors.  The jewelry set above does have quite a bit of lavender in it, and this really came about by accident late in the creative process.  I started out with yellow clay.  I decided to do a jelly roll (a cane with striped alternating colors spiralling from the center outward) in yellow and lavender.  I was very unsatisfied with the color effects, because the lavender tended toward gray and the yellow didn't look bright at all.  I decided the only thing to do was to change the focus to some brighter colors.  I selected bright green and maroon.  I rolled the nondescript spiral jellyrolls into flat sheets, added flat sheets of green and maroon, started a new jelly roll and then decided to use the same technique as a chrysanthemum cane where you use a credit card to make indentations through most of the layers of clay to make flower petals (or agate undulations).  I was happy with the end result of this cane.  There was leftover yellow and "gray" clay, so the base beads came from that and then were covered with slices from the "agate flower" cane.  I made three big rectangular beads, two smaller rectantular beads, and six round beads with the millefiori "agate flower" cane.  The green and maroon made it possible to add some very interesting accent beads to enhance and call attention to them.  I added gold seed beads just to play on the yellow and add sparkle, red swarovskis to call attention to the maroon flower layers, bright green translucent beads to bring out the green agate layers and put them all together in an alternating pattern. Once I got started with the necklace design, I felt that it needed an added element to really make the colors and shapes "pop."  Somehow, the idea of sliding green jump rings sprang to mind.  I had some lovely aluminum pale green jump rings that seemed to go with all of the colors harmoniously, so in they went.  This worked out well, because the green beads had a big enough diameter to limit the range of movement of the green metal rings.  I liked the design so much that I just had to make earrings to match.   The idea of kinetic jewelry is very appealing to me these days and I plan to explore many avenues with this theme.  After all, it is fun to play and fidget with your jewelry!.