Festival Lights – Andrew Thornton Challenge

Every so often, jewelry artist Andrew Thornton organizes a beading challenge. He chooses a theme and makes up 20 kits. This month’s theme is Festival Lights, and I snagged one of the kits. Each kit consists of a small bag of the “luxury bead blend”, along with a small bag of coordinating beads and some other goodies that vary from month to month. Also included is a mystery component.

This is what we got for this month:

The top picture is the selection of beads and other goodies, and the bottom picture is the luxury bead blend.

This month I was captivated by the bead blend, so I decided to do some freeform beadweaving. I used peyote stitch and played with making random increases as I went along. I’m not sure you can see it in the picture, but the increases added quite a bit of texture to the piece. I used Andrew’s ceramic disk (that was the mystery component) at one side, and balanced it with a couple simple dangles on the other side. Then I attached the entire piece to some chain to finish the necklace.

Here’s my piece. The increases also caused a bit of ruffling. Next time I think I’ll add more increases, to make it really ripple.

See the jewelry made by the other participants by checking out Andrew’s page here: http://andrew-thornton.blogspot.com/2014/09/festival-lights-challenge-reveal.html