I picked up these pieces of quartz at a gem and jewelry show in Columbus, OH almost a year ago, and these pretty crystals have sat on the back burner for far too long. I'm quite addicted to the color combination of purple and copper, and felt that there was enough color contrast in the quartz to exploit the beauty of these crystals in a combination of copper beads and lilac pearls that have also been sitting in my bead organizer for *cough mutter cough* years now.
The loose initial concept I had in mind was to make a choker-length necklace with the large crystal as the focal of the choker and the smaller two crystals reserved for matching earrings.
The thing with loose initial concepts is that, like battle plans, they get blown to pieces at first contact with the enemy. Once I had wire wrapped the main crystal and began stringing beads, it became evident that the crystal was going to stand out a little too much to my liking and I decided that adding the smaller crystals would be the ideal way to pull the focal back into the necklace, in addition to adding the copper drop with loops to add pearls to the focal in an effort to unify the continuity of the color scheme.
Here's the fun part: In order to get the drop to hang where I wanted it to on the focal, I had to add copper beads... but the wire was already obviously wrapped in place. My solution was to take some leftover copper crimp covers and bend them around the wire. Instant bead!
What I like best about this necklace is that the composition of the focal allows for a reversible necklace. The difference is subtle, but having the option of having the drop pendant either hang in front or back of the main focal crystal means that I get to display both sides of this interesting crystal, because there are textural differences between the two sides and in this case I feel that both sides of the crystal are the "good" side.
As far as difficulty goes, this wasn't a hard necklace for me to put together and I only spent about four hours on it from start to finish. The tricky part was wire wrapping the crystals so that they were aesthetically pleasing yet securely held, and I think I was fairly lucky to get it all right on the first go. The trick with wire wrapping is to proceed slowly and get a feel for what the wire wants to do. This was a thicker wire, which meant more pressure to get it to meld to the form of the crystal. It was a balancing act between applying force to the wire but not so much force that I damaged the crystal, so I didn't actually use any tools to help me manipulate the wire until I got to the stage where I was ready to add loops to the ends for stringing.
Overall, I'm really quite thrilled with how this necklace turned out and if I got the opportunity to go back and revisit this necklace, I would consider adding a second, smaller wire to do some more detailed, decorative wrapping around the focal, and I would try to shorten the length a little. This is a necklace that should go with either a high-neckline shirt like a turtleneck, or a shirt with a lower neckline that clears the length of the necklace. It really doesn't lay right if it has to fall over a collar, so it does limit how many outfits I can wear it with. Otherwise, consider me happy!
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