An Inspiring Leaf.

 

Poking about on my desk I found a carved leaf made from mookaite. I’d forgotten that I had it, it was given to me a few months ago and I had no idea what to do with it so it ended up on my desk and got buried under desk stuff.

It felt nice to hold, like those thumb stones you can get, and as I was handling it I thought that I would make a charm bracelet using the mookaite leaf as a starting point. I pulled out my bead boxes and got together a pile of beads in a sort of spicy palette, charms and the odd item from my found objects box. I liked bronze findings for this as I thought it would add extra warmth.

 

Obviously I felt that I needed more beads so I ordered a couple of mixed bags in the same palette. Making the charms isn’t difficult at all, it’s just threading the beads onto a headpin, bending the top, cutting off the excess and forming a loop. Once I had enough for two charms on each link of the bracelet chain I put it together. I started with the leaf in the centre and tried to evenly spread out the bigger charms and then filled in with the smaller ones. I tried to keep the colours even but it didn’t really matter.

 

The end result is quite heavy but still wearable and I really like the colours. So much so that I made a necklace with the same kind of palette though I left off the darker, more maroon colours.

 

Instead of starting with a chain and adding charms, I made the necklace using rosary links. I threaded the beads onto wire and looped both ends then linked them together. It ended up a little long and I thought about taking some of the links back out but decided, in the end, to wear it doubled.

 All this from a little leaf.