The Frog Prince Design Challenge

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Allegory Gallery's fairy tale mystery challenge for January is the Frog Prince.  This challenge also celebrates Pantone's Color of the Year for 2017: Greenery.  Greenery is described as a "fresh and zesty yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring when nature's greens revive, restore and renew."  What a wonderful color to receive in the mail this time of year!  Just look at the luscious green beads I received in the kit:

Beautiful shades of green in the Frog Prince Mystery Challenge

I find it interesting that, although I don't really care for green as a color I wear myself, I absolutely love to play around with the color when I make jewelry.  I guess it's my longing to dig in the dirt, especially this time of year, and to tend to flowers, shrubs and vegetables that draw me to this color.  I started my challenge pieces with the gorgeous frog pendant that Andrew Thornton included in the kit.

Frog Prince Necklace with Andrew Thornton Pendant

I love the little frog pendant and wanted to highlight it in my necklace.  I chose a green faceted teardrop bead along with this really cool blue and green crackle square bead, then wire wrapped them together to form the dangle with the pendant.  Leaves came to mind when I was thinking about frogs, so I used the pressed glass leaf beads from the kit, more faceted teardrops and some small green leaves I had in my collection. 















My next design is a long, 33 inch necklace I made using the beautiful green seed beads from the kit. I added some copper chain, metallic copper colored seed beads and some Czech glass English Cut matte metallic beads I had on hand.  The large bead I used in the pendant design has a greenish gold tint to it and the vintage Lucite drop is a lovely mix of blueish greens with a bit of gold swirled in.

I usually try to make at least one pair of earrings using the kit.  I made two:  in the first one I wanted to use the interesting polymer clay beads, but alas, I broke one of them attempting to make the hole just a little bit bigger... sniff.  So I found some old lampwork beads I had on hand that looked sort of like frog eyes to me - albeit unevenly dilated frog eyes : ) - for my design using the wax linen cord and more of the small beads.  
 


In my last pair of earrings I used some polymer clay beads with some twisted yellow green beads on the bottom.  I really like how these look on but I've been having a hard time getting a good photo of them.

That's it for my challenge pieces.  Please join Allegory Gallery's Design Challenges Facebook page to see what everyone else made.

Thanks for joining me here today and come back on February 23 for the next Mystery Challenge - "Queen of Hearts".  I can't wait to see what William and Andrew have in that kit - thanks guys!