My Natural Pearl Collection

Thank you, hanadama, amti, Sun, and BWeaves! It's my first abalone pearl piece and I was so psyched when I found it because I L-O-V-E arts and crafts jewelry. Shout out to MaeJean Vintage on Etsy; they were great to work with :)
 
MSC--I love the abalone pearl!! So pretty. The setting has the pink and green gold that you see in Black Hills gold jewelry. I have a soft spot for that having grown up in the Dakotas. Love it!!
 
Thank you, Jersey, Cathy, PW, Kat and Kalmen!

PW - the green and rose gold and leaf styling instantly reminded me of Black Hills gold too! It's too bad the piece is unmarked, so no telling where it was made within the US.
 
Newly completed Pteria sterna necklace! I used a 1.2mm rose gold ball chain and wire wrapped tiny P. sterna pearls using gold-filled wire (I'll have to redo this in the future since the chain is solid gold). This was meant to be a design test since I only had gold-filled wire on hand, but I ended up really liking it a whole lot. I hammered each head pin and then smoothed out the planished ends to remove all of the sharp bits from hammering. Definitely a tedious process. I made the eyes small enough that they cannot move out of place, but are free to rotate within their station. This was also tedious. All that said, I love the extra flash the planished ends bring and overall it's boho feel. I'll probably give it a year or 2 before bothering to redo with gold wire - my hands need time to recover!
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It's absolutely gorgeous. And boy what an effort! It is a beauty
 
MSC, I love love love that necklace. It's beautiful. All your hard work was worth it. It turned out great.
 
A labor of love indeed, MSC ... so so lovely! The hammered ends are wonderful!
 
Just beautiful. My hands and eyes hurt with the amount of work that went into your wire project. I often wear a jewelers magnifying headpiece when making small loops. It's probably just my old eyes.....
 
Just a quick update! I've been on my required 31 day furlough and I was supposed to be in Shenandoah NP this week, but some incidents with my dogs (mainly just a ruckus over the deer) forced me to leave early. So, I've been catching up on business and partaking in some revamp projects. When I purchased the ring about 6 months ago it came with white rice crispy pearls, which I really dislike. At first, I had added some opaque ruby briolettes, but was never really satisfied with that look. I've now changed over to all pipis. I had some leftover bi- and tri-colored pipis that had too much cream color for my other projects, so I used them here. I added one tiny champagne colored diamond, but I am going to add more once I pick up some 28G gold wire. The earrings were from my mom, I think they were likely my nonna's or from someone in the family over in Sicily. They are 18kt white gold and they had a 5.5mm white cultured pearl dangle. I had a couple of unmatched in color, but fairly similar in size, pipis and a couple of golden tiny pipis and decided to replace the cultured pearls with those. Eventually, I'd like to get a pair of well matched 5.5-6mm orange-gold button shaped pipis that I can have claw set in white gold to replace the drilled pipi dangles. I think that is possibly 2 years into the future because I would want some very nice pearls for that.

A quick plug here, if the moderators don't mind: I'm walking in the Durham, NC Walk to End Alzheimer's event on Saturday and I am taking donations to support all that Alzheimer's Association does to support folks with dementia and their caregivers. The link to the donation page is here: Donate Here

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Don;t know how I missed this thread so much to see but love the idea of hanging pearls...Those are great leveback earrings & you can change the pearls. Where did you get the wire with the gold bead on the end? It really is nice for drilled pearls.
 
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