Shhhh! It's a secret!

Friends have posted on their blogs about secret projects... things that they cannot talk about publicly. I find myself currently in the same position.

I can't tell you what I'm working on, but it's starting out with these beads:

Of course there will be lots more colors when this is complete...  updates to follow.  

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I took two classes from Mary Hettmansperger on Friday and Saturday.  I will find and post  Friday's results when I can, but Friday wasn't such a fun day for me.  It's hard when I try to learn skills that just don't come intuitively to me, and Friday was just one of those days.

Saturday was a different, though, as we learned all sorts of wire wrapping techniques.  I will find my other samples - that I didn't complete - later too, but here's the finished item that I wrapped.  I started out with a plain wooden elongated "donut" pendant and wrapped it.  This is what I got:

Mary is delightful, by the way; and I thank my friends at Creative Castle in Newbury Park for bringing her and other artists of her calibur to their store so that we can learn from world class artists.

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Sometimes when I complete a piece, it's done.  Other times, it needs more work.  This is one such item:

Before:

After:

It just needed that extra punch of gold stripe in the middle to make it pop!  I'm taking this piece out of my Etsy store for the time being, though.  Notice the lighter beads?   I'd like to say that they're just a reflection of the sun glinting off of the bracelet, but they're not.  In truth, they're beads that appear to have lost their color.  Usually that happens only with cheap seed beads... often of Chinese origin because they dyed the surface of the beads rather than infused the beads with color the whole way through.  

I'm confused by this happening with the beads in this bracelet, though, as they're supposedly Japanese - they make the highest quality and most technically engineered seed beads - and come from a VERY reputable source.  I'm going to wear this bracelet myself for a while and see what happens, and bring the whole issue to the people who sold the beads to me in a couple of weeks.  I know that they would never knowingly put out inferior product on their shelvs (I only deal with reputable sources) but sometimes stores can be victims too.

Meanwhile, back to my secret project.