June AJE Component of the Month

This month our component comes from our team member,  Linda Landig.  We are so proud of Linda over at AJE...she has just started playing with clay and look at all the gorgeous pieces she is cranking out!  She is a natural!

I had a hard time choosing one, so I asked her to surprise me.  I received one of the little pink squares with a blue flower.  It yelled "Summer!!!!" to me loudly as I unwrapped it, so I set out to create this summer of love, peace and flowers, leather and ceramic, hippie necklace!

I really wanted to keep this piece as simple as possible, so I started by looking through my leather stash and found this length of natural, tan leather that I thought would be perfect.  For accent beads, I decided to torch-fire some bisque beads I had in stock...not only did I have the perfect shades of transparent enamel to match the pendant, the beads have really big holes and worked perfectly with the leather!  It took me several attempts to get the necklace the way I wanted it...I really didn't want a whole necklace of beads, and I knew I didn't want to include any metal components, so I incorporated adjustable, sliding knots to finish it.

Originally, the pendant was tied on to the leather with the beads knotted up the length  a little more sporadically, but to me, even though I didn't want to add any other components, I felt it needed a bit more oomph.

After searching on Pinterest for designs with leather cording, I found some plain cord necklaces that incorporated knots...one in particular caught my eye.  A Celtic heart knot.  There are several tutorials out there, but I found the easiest one on You Tube.

After  playing with it, I realized my leather cord wasn't thick enough to make it look like this and it was sort of unstable...every time I knotted a bead on, or messed with it, the shape went wonky!  I also realized that even though I like the idea of a knot, I didn't want it to be really heart shaped.  I played with it and reshaped it into more of a triangle, exaggerating the bottom point more so that I could use a jump ring to hand the pendant.

I think it works!

There you have it!  Last night as I was finishing it up (for about the 3rd time), my hubs was watching a documentary on Jimi Hendrix, and I thought, "yes...this hippie necklace was meant to be!"

Thanks Linda, for the wonderful pieces.  Make more!  Now off to see what our design team and guests came up with...you know they rocked!

Guests
Ann Schroeder
 Mischelle Andrade Fanucchi

 Therese Frank

AJE Members

Susan Kennedy

Diana Ptaszynsk

Linda Landig

Lesley Watt

Caroline Dewison

Francesca Watson

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Rebekah Payne

Kristen Stevens