The Evolution of an Upcycled Necklace and What's on My Desk

It's been a wild few days around here. My grandmother's been in the hospital since Saturday with unknown pains. They're still running tests and trying to figure out what's wrong. I've been with her almost every day to help. In fact, I'm writing this from her hospital room now. She's starting to feel better though thank goodness. Yesterday we had a line of severe storms come through the area. Since I'm an hour from the hospital, I stayed home to get some chores done and hunker down. In the end, the storms didn't hit us very hard but wrecked havoc in areas around us. I'm sure you've seen the news. While I was home, I was able to work on a project I had started on Saturday.

It began with me pulling out my pickle jar of treasures. Basically, this is a tall jar stuffed to the top with old and broken jewelry. Some of these pieces came with the jar, some I've added from other purchases.

I only pulled out items from the top few layers to figure out what I wanted to alter and upcycle.

This pair of clip-on earrings caught my attention. They both originally looked like the one on the left. I was actually about to get rid of them, thinking there wasn't much I could do with them. However, I decided to stop and reconsider. When I realized I could pull the leather strip out from the chain, I changed my mind about doing away with them.

After getting the leather off the chain, I clipped and pulled the other pieces off the earring.

I washed the soldered chain portion with warm water and soap before working on adding a patina. At first, I tried black Rub 'N Buff but that was fairly unsuccessful. So, I went a little more hardcore with Novacan Black to age it a touch. From there, I went through my chain, beads, charms, and other whatnot to find bits and bobs to accent the golden aged chain.

Pulling it all together didn't really take long, but delayed me the most. I tried a couple different layouts.

In the end, I just added the beads and charms to the soldered chain that became the focal. The actual necklace chain is made of some gold tone faceted glass beads, olive dyed jade beads, and gunmetal colored seed beads on a rosary chain. I haven't added a clasp yet because I can't seem to decide on the length of the chain. So there the necklace sits on my desk at home... along with the rest of the mess.

So that's what's on my desk this Wednesday; a necklace to finish and a mess to clean up when I get home. How's your desk looking?