Circles of pearls

I've been playing some with freshwater pearls lately.  I made the first, larger circle using cubic RAW, alternating cubes with triangular forms to get the curve you need to make a circle.  My intent was for it to be the focal of a pendant.  I didn't like how much thread showed.  Part of the problem, I think, was that, because the pearls are quite a light gray, I used white fireline instead of black, and I think that was a mistake. The black would have disappeared into the shadows of the pearls better than the white.   Still, in either color, there's a lot of thread.  The second one was done (with black fireline) using the hexagon as a base, as I learned from the beaded molecules blog.  It's smaller, but I like it much better.  I like the openness of it.  Also, if I were making a series of them for a necklace, which I probably will do, the weight is less (54 pearls instead of 65), which I prefer.

Oxidized copper and stick pearls

This was a fun piece to make.  I did a necklace a while ago that had some stick pearls in it in place of the oxidized copper tubes.  But I used dark gray pearls and I only had 10 or 12 of them, so they didn't have as much impact as I'd hoped for. This one came out more the way I intended.  I've found that if I alternate 1 or 2 octahedrons with  what I guess you'd call a triangular prism, you get a blend of firmness ( from the octahedrons, since they're all triangles) and flexibility (from the prisms, since they have squares for the sides with a triangular cross section) that works pretty well.  Anyway, I enjoyed making this. 

Oxidized copper and pearls

     I went to a bead show several months ago.  I don't get to do that much, as I live in the boondocks, so I do most of my bead buying online.  It's so much fun to look at actual beads.  Anyway, I saw these dark stick pearls, and thought how great it would be to mix them in with my oxidized copper tubes.  They've been sitting in a bag for a while, but I finally got it done and I like the result.
    Another thing that I liked here was the photography.  2 things I did differently:  I used a flash, which I usually don't do, but it lightened the shadows alot.  Also I took the picture from a very shallow angle, which brought out the 3-dimensional-ness of the piece.