This was very much not a sewing project, but it did use (heavy, waxed) thread and it used up time that probably would have been otherwise spent sewing, so why not include it on this, my sewing blog?
Behold, a ghostly and green necklace!
Susan, a viewer of my old doll YouTube videos, very generously sent many lovely doll and craft items, including some sets of Halloween themed glass beads, which included the ghosts, green wrapped candies, and green candy corn beads. The ghosts and candies inspired me to sort through the rest of my bead stash and collect beads in combinations of green (but not too dark and not too yellow), opaque white, and black. Susan also sent the vial of clear-glass-with-black-center beads, which I decided only relatively recently to add to this assortment.
On Saturday morning I decided it was time to start assembling everything.
Part of the reason I had been putting this project off for so long was because my default for assembling necklaces is to put everything on eye pins and either connect them directly together or dangle them from chains.
Like this
I love the finished effect, but I do not trust my wrists and elbows to hold up to the wire bending process as well as they did when I made the above necklace seven and a half years ago.
However, another big reason I tended toward eye pins and chains and jump rings is because my ability to tie the necessary knots to keep the strings of beads attached to the end caps was...lacking. But! Last week, I finally thought to look up how to tie knots snugly between beads, and realized I could use the same technique to tie (relatively) snug knots in the final end cap. I also rediscovered some very heavy waxed thread in my supply stash, and decided that would be perfect for tying knots between beads.
It turned out it was not perfect for tying knots between these beads, because their holes were so large they still sipped past the knots, so I went to regular bead stringing, and I was having so much fun sorting and stringing that I had seven strands before I realized it.
And then I was looking for something else online and stumbled across the concept of putting beads on simple crochet chains and decided to add some of those, as a way to use up the rest of the clear/black beads, since there weren't enough of those left to make an entire other strand. I thought they'd add some nice texture, too...especially considering how bad I am at even the most basic crochet chain. tExtUrE.
That brought me up to 9 strings of beads, and I felt like the two strands of 'feature beads' were getting lost, so I made another pass at my bead stash and sorted out enough varied beads to make another strand. But. Many of them were fake pearls with really small holes, so I had to switch away from the lovely heavy thread (which was so heavy that it took extra leverage from pliers to get the holes in the end caps to move over the doubled thread at the end in the twisted wire beading needle) to a lighter waxed nylon that was actually meant for beading. All the knots at all the end caps are reinforced with Fray Check, so I hope even the lighter thread knots stay put.
Then I separated out 20 lengths of chain at 14 links each--an extremely arbitrarily chosen length that I am still second-guessing--and attached them to all the end caps. It was only after that that I got into my findings to look for the connectors needed to get the ridiculous amount of strands down to something easy to attach to a clasp, and it was only around then that I even remembered that I had the green crescent connectors...which turned out to have five loops on one side, making them just about perfect for this project. Kudos to Past Me for seeing them on super clearance on Fire Mountain Gems and saying "ooh shiny and cheap, will buy."
Then more small lengths of chain and the toggle clasp and the project was finished Sunday evening.
...and of course, during the process of sorting beads for this, I found a color combination that inspired me to sort out another stack of beads, for some other time in the future when "something more repetitive than sewing but not as repetitive as rerooting" is what my brain wants to do.
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