A new inspiration

 I was looking at the current issue of Metalsmith magazine the other day.  They had an article about Betty Cooke, who's been a well known jewelry designer for decades now.  Besides loving her work, I'm interested because my niece Kate has worked for her off and on for several years at her shop, The Store, Ltd., in Baltimore.  Anyway the piece shown here is one of her better known pieces, and I've seen pictures of it before.  But the magazine picture was bigger, and I noticed that there are silver tubes over the neckwire at the bottom to control the spacing of the oval elements.  That got me thinking, and luckily I have some tubing large enough to go over 16 ga. wire.  Of course for me the tubes would be part of structures of some sort.  After playing for a while, I came up with the piece below.  I'm pretty pleased with it, although it's not quite as clean and minimalist as the other one.Actually, thinking about a more minimalist look, I experimented with what it would look like if I had left out the 2 small diamond shaped pieces that ard between the 3 larger pieces.  What I did was to take my photo of the necklace and photoshop them out to see what It would look like.  The photoshopping was really crude, but it did give me an idea of what it would be.  I decided I liked it better the way it is, but it was an interesting experiment.  I'll be doing more with this idea.