Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Wednesday Worktable

I still have the ubiquitous zombie iolite fringe necklace on my workbench this morning.

It suffered a little setback last week, when I passed the halfway point and started fringing up the other side - I had worried about this, because I knew that the 2 halves needed to match, and I thought I was measuring and compensating for the decrease, but after I powered through 4 inches of fringing on Friday, it was time to change thread. I held the necklace up, and the entire 4 inches I had just finished was too long, and it was obvious. So I spent Saturday taking out the 4 inches, and I started this section again yesterday.

So I will be working on the fringe today, but...

I'll have to take a little break to work on this:

This is a repair - the customer brought in a very old garnet necklace (these are 4mm garnet rounds). It had been woven, in some variation of netting, on silk thread. The silk was filthy, and had stretched out over 2 inches - so repair was definitely called for.
I didn't want to attempt to re-weave it, so we decided to turn it into a multistrand twisted torsade, which she  is very excited about.

It took several days to string all these garnets - it was slow and tedious, so I'd work for a few hours and then go on to something else. I started to dread stringing the garnets! My friend Sonya actually finished the last of it for me - yay!

I delayed finishing the necklace because I am teaching a class in multistrand finishing this afternoon, and it is SO much easier to teach a stringing class when you actually have a project to demo on! So I saved this project for class this afternoon - I'll have 5 strands to demonstrate with, so I hope that suffices!

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