Echo Creative Club - Polarity Beads

Last year Jeannie was looking for artists to participate in her 2014 Echo Creative Club, and I signed mom and I up as fast as possible.  I have been reading what other people have done with Jeannie's pieces and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to get mom and me back into creating after the last year of nothingness.

Jeannie's explanation:

How it will work
Each month I will exchange art beads of the same value with one bead maker/jewelry designer. Then we will both design a piece of jewelry and write a blog post on the 25th of that month.   My blog post will be a bead maker/designer spotlight about you.  Just by answering some questions so our readers can be introduced to your work.

We received a detailed email from Jeannie asking us:

Next decide what bead of yours you will exchange with me and what bead of mine you want me to exchange with you.    I want to be surprised. I love all colors and all art beads and I can work with anything.  Please send one of equal value and one you are currently selling/in stock through 2014. 

I'd like to have everyone work with something different so choose three different things you like.  Don't mail out anything until you hear back from me letting you know what I'm sending you and when.  Based on that information you can decide what to send me.

So, mom and I headed on over to Jeannie's site to check out all the goodies.  Mom and I had a Word document going of all the goodies we both liked and then of course we had to narrow it down (I thought I kept the email with our choices but I didn't).

What Jeannie sent us was this:

Sorry - swiped from her site because I didn't take a before picture

Her description of the polarity beads:

The look of lampwork without the heavy weight.
These beads are handmade by me in a technique that is very labor intensive.
The infused color is deeply embedded with a hard, gloss finish. Each bead is slowly hand rolled. After the beads are cured they are sanded, hand buffed and then sealed with two coats of hard polyurethane.

Mom and I loved Jeannie's beads - they are so awesome to work with.  Of course, you must be wondering what we did, so here you go.

Here is a better look at Jeannie's "Polarity Beads" - aren't they awesome!  We used accent beads of blue Czech and large brass spacer beads and smaller brass spacer beads.

"Polarity"

A look at the full necklace we created with her beads and our enameled copper pendant.

We based our pendant on one of Jeannie's Acanthus pendants.  I tried to get the enamel as close to the bead color as possible but not quite the same, but I think the piece came out great!

"Polarity"

Here is another view of the necklace.

Mom and I want to thank Jeannie for allowing us to participate in this wonderful challenge.

You can go to Jeannie's blog and check out what she created with our lampwork glass beads.  And if you are in the mood to do a little shopping (which I highly recommend) go to Jeannie's store and check out all of her goodies!