Beaded Jewelry & Vintage Nightshirt

 After a long pause, I decided to make some jewelry for a change. I find making jewelry very relaxing. But on the other hand, so is sewing, knitting etc. ;) I like combining colors and shapes though I usually end up with tone to tone jewelry. I think it is much easier to match the clothes, especially if you are already wearing a patterned dress.

So here´s what I´ve been up to past few days:

I´ve had this selection of red beads for about a year and a half. The selection hasn´t just bright red shades, but also coral and brick shades, which I didn´t like that much. All in all I wasn´t very inspired to use these beads in my projects. Browsing beading books I got the idea to combine these red beads with hot pink and silver beads. I like the vibrant and warm outcome. I will be wearing these beads after all!

I bought this butterfly glass pendant couple of months ago and now I really wanted to use it in some jewelry. This is my own assemble and it uses the same colors as the butterfly: purple, lavender, bronze and black. 

I made one similar pendant bracelet like this before using instructions from a book Vintage-Style Jewelry by Deborah Schneebeli-Morrell. I bought the glass beads specially for this project. The previous bracelet was made using light pink and lavender beads with silver chain. While I was making this one, I figured I´m making exactly the same bracelet using exactly the same color palette. So I quickly added dark purple bicone beads to make the appearance darker and more purple than the other bracelet.

The idea for this set came from a book Designing Bead & Wire Jewelry by Renata Graham. The book has a picture with a necklace similar to this one. I loved it! The gold-amber shades and the idea how the beads are "locked" in small groups using the wire. I had to have it, so I bought these beads specially for this set. The book doesn´t have instructions for this necklace but it was easy to figure it out from the picture.

This Victorian style necklace is from a book A Beading Romance by Kelly Wiese. All the projects in this book are made using beading thread and a needle. This is a first piece of jewelry I used this method on. It is not difficult but it takes practice. The individual rings of beads are made and then connected together. 

And some sewing of course ;) This is a Vintage Nightshirt from December 2014 issue of Burda magazine. I plan to make the whole collection of nightwear from this magazine. This nightshirt has A-line and a large pleat in back. 

The letters are embroidered by hand since I haven´t try yet the darning presser foot on any of my machines...

I used a contrasting dark red lace trim instead of matching satin binding.