Working Tuesday: Pearl Flowers

If you've followed me on Facebook, you know I've been doing quite a bit of work turning pearls into flowers with Swarovski crystal centers. The key is finding pearls that look like petals and then dreaming how they should look.

The diamond shaped pearls remind me a lot of periwinkle flower petals. The keshi pearls with their irregular shapes are like rose petals. And the potato pearls are almost perfectly rounded like the crocus flower. I've already put a couple of these combs in the Etsy shop, but I've still got to attach the diamond petaled flowers to silver hair pins that have yet to be made.

I'm still experimenting with the different shapes and numbers of petals, but I love how these are turning out. They combine two of my favorite things: pearls and flowers! It's almost like making something out of nothing....

Working Tuesday: April showers bring May flowers...

Ok. I admit it. I know. I've been obsessed with flowers lately. Alright, so it's not a recent obsession, but the difference is now I'm posting them all over my blog, my website... you get the idea. And I think it's been leaking into my work. Ok, it IS leaking into my work.

A couple weeks ago I got some Swarovski petal pearls in an order from Fire Mountain gems thinking I would use them in some wedding accessories and I think the results were wonderful! I think I'm either going to use them in a comb or in individual hair pins. Either would be lovely!

I'd like to do the same thing with petal-like Keshi pearls, but have wondered if I can actually make a profit on something like that considering the Keshi pearls I liked were somewhere around $250 a strand!

Those flowers went so well for me, I picked up some petal shaped dichroic glass beads in pink. I added some pink buttons for the center and started playing around with those as pendants. The latest I've paired with rose quartz and some golden spacer beads. I'm still playing around with laying out the design, but I'm having fun with that result too.

Last weekend, after spending a day photographing Mama E's garden, I decided to pull together some bluebell earrings from some Czech flower beads that have been hanging around. I've been collecting flower beads for a couple years now and I'm just getting around to pulling together some designs with them - and I'm just getting started with what I've got!

So you'll probably be seeing more flowers. But it's spring, so that's probably not such a bad thing!