I'd Rather Bead than Cook

I've had a heck of time trying to do this post. Blogger has gone stupid on me and instead of normal text it keeps reverting to Html. Rage inducing stuff I have to say. Just a couple of pieces I've made over the last few days.
A large, what I think is an etched metal ribbon slide for scrapbooking that I removed from the spine of one of my art journals. I took it off because I wanted to see if my cropadile would punch holes in it (which it does) so then I added a chain and clasp.Rub n buffed some metal letters and glued them on and added several charms to the
slot at the bottom.

A gorgeous Cathy Dailey clasp.......
.....which I added to this chain. Attached some beads, mother of pearl, web jasper, and faceted cloudy quartz which has one of Cathy's silver handmade bead caps that I just love.
Some goodies arrived in the mail yesterday, things from Humble Beads and Summers Studio so I've got lots of things to play with over the next few days, along with the arrival of my new oven. I worked out the other day the oven we have at the moment is almost 40 years old. It's a gas oven and two of the hobs don't work properly, the griller hasn't worked since we moved in (22 year ago) and the oven hasn't worked for the last 10 years. I've been making do with a little bench top oven that belonged to my mum, so now that will become my craft oven.
Hello polymer clay, shrink plastic and anything else crafty that can be cooked in a little oven. I'm more excited about having a dedicated craft oven than I am about the new oven because the new oven means I have to cook! Can you tell I'm not overly thrilled about the cooking thing?

Visions and Vampires

Lying in bed the other night and trying to get images of vampire babies and werewolves out of my head (I'm reading the Twilight series). So the next best thing to think about was jewelry and I had a vision. I could see this necklace draped around the slender neck of someone tall and willowy. That's not me by the way, I'm short and wallowing in my own flubby fat!
Now the thing about visions is this.....the vision and the reality are sometimes two different things and turning the vision into reality is something else again.
Out came the trusty cuttlebug.
I cut out 28 small, medium and large grungeboard discs.
Then I cut out 56 small, medium and large wall paper discs. Ok, this is taking a bit longer than I anticipated.

Edged all 84 pieces with a brown sharpie. No white edges, thank you Kelsey, you taught me well.

Glued the wall paper to the grungeboard on both sides. By this stage I'm getting a over the whole 'vision'.
Out came the cropadile. What a lifesaver that thing is. Proceeded to set 56 eyelets.

Then slowly worked out the design. Had to add some other elements to it to give it some weight.
Antique gold chain and some embelishments.
And here you have the finished piece. I started this on Saturday afternoon and finished it today, 4 days later.
I didn't end up using all the discs, if I had, the necklace would be about knee length, but that's ok because the leftovers can be used for other things.
Next time I have a vision I think I'll mull it over for quite some time before I decide to give it a go.