Nina Designs Blog Partnership Program

Recently Nina Designs contacted me about a jewelry blog partnership and I agreed to participate.  They sent me a goodie box with some fun pieces.

Here are some photos of the goodies that I received.  There was on piece of green silk ribbon, 4 earring pieces, some head pins, gold rings, 2 lotus flower charms, some connected flower petal charms, and one pendant piece that looked like leaves or flower petals.

I took everything out of the box and set it out for a day and just looked at the pieces and tried to decide what I would do with them all.  I didn't have to use all of them and I could use anything else that I had to make what ever I wanted.

To me there was an orient, lotus blossom theme.  The color of all the items was gold and the green, silk ribbon.  I ended up digging through all my beads and "stuff" to see if anything struck my fancy.  I found one piece of black metal with a lotus blossom, water lily theme, but it was all black.  I got out my perm ink stains and painted the flowers and lily pads with iridescent paints.  The problem was that there were a couple of places that one could slide a piece through to make it into a bracelet.  I found a metal dragonfly that set on the outside and covered one of the openings.  I didn't have anything for a pendant that was as gold colored and the gold pieces they sent.  I did have an antique gold pendant with the same petal shapes that the pendant they sent had.  I added some brighter gold to it and then put the black piece on top.  I then put a protective coating over the pieces to protect the stain. The petal/leaf piece that was in my goodie box was next.  I added it above the main pendant as a connector for the chain.  The leaf shape was a great match to the pendant.  From there I uses the blossom charms as connector pieces  to start the chain.

I found some pearl beads that were a close match to the stain I used on the flowers on the pendant and then a glass and gold bead.  I put these together and used a couple of the gold rings provided.  The rings didn't have an opening so I used some of my tiny rings to connect them to the beads.  I used the green silk ribbon by threading it through the top rings and doubling it so that it ties behind the neck.

 

I did have some help from my trusty companion during all this.  T.S. Eliot, my BIG helpful cat was there and got into the photos as well.

T. S. Eliot

He decided that he would just stretch out and get right in the middle of everything.  He has his own spot on my table.  (You can see it in the Messy Room Blog Hop photos)  Today he wanted the WHOLE table.

With this piece finished I moved on to some more of the pieces they sent.

I picked the teardrop/flower petal pieces to work with next.  I love the color orange and don't do a lot of jewelry with that color.  I'm a Leo and fire colors are my favorite.  This time I decided that orange and red were the colors to use.  I found 2 white beads with a similar lotus pattern in red and orange.  To those I added a gold bead at each end.  I also love dragonflies and found a gold finding that matched the gold.  What I did was turn the dragon fly over and noticed a groove in the back.  There was a hole at the top of the piece but not at the bottom.  I wanted to connect the dragonfly to the chain at both ends.  I took a tiny eye pin and laid it in the groove on the back and glued it in.  Now I had a ring at both ends!  I thought about wire wrapping the pin, but the glue seemed to hold it.

dragon fly with eye pin added to end

 I found an orange, red and gold flower that has a gem in the center and made it the main pendant.  Nina Designs sent me 2 of the connected, 3 petal/drop pieces so I used them as part of the chain to connect the glass beads to the pendant and dragonfly.  After that I used some red and orange glass beads with some small red beads to finish the chain up.  I added some gold chain that the whole piece hangs from. 

finished necklace

 Now, I don't make a lot of earrings.  They just aren't big sellers for me in my etsy shop so I don't have many listed.  I do make them and sell them in a little coffee shop that sells my jewelry.  But, having said that I had some really nice earring pieces to work with from Nina Designs.
Sticking with the red color theme I found some red glass eye shaped beads.  I took gold wire and made a loop to hang them from.  I used the larger earrings pieces and then took the 4  remaining rings that were sent and put them on the front and back of the bead.  I really did like the look of them.  And as Brenda Sue from B'sue Boutiques says, "easy peasy!"

I made another pair of earrings with the last earring pieces that were enclosed.  They were some very nice hammered front pieces.  I used, once again, a glass, flat sided, red bead and attached them to the earring back.  I used the last 2 gold rings and dangled them from the bottom of the red bead.




It was a real challenge for me to come up with something from "given" stuff.  This is the first time I've done this.  I hope that there will be more in the future.  I really enjoyed making these pieces.  The only thing that I didn't use were the gold head pins.  They would make beautiful flower centers sometime in the future.  Big thanks to Nina Designs for asking me to participate in the blog partnership.

Legal stuff: The materials above were provided as part of the Nina Designs blogging program. The author of this blog has not received any payment from above-mentioned company. The post above represents only personal opinion of the blog author.Yadda, Yadda. :0)