Fire and Water Challenge

Hi, welcome to this month's Allegory Gallery's challenge: Water & Fire Mystery Competition.  As with every challenge Allegory Gallery presents, Andrew Thornton selects a beautiful collection of various beads, each with a particular color palette. For this competition, Andrew states that "when we created the concept of this challenge, we thought about forces of creation and we instantly thought of the elements...water and fire both have many beneficial attributes as life-givers and influencers of change, but they can also be harmful and detrimental to life.  Water and fire also cancel each other out.  As with all things, there's a balance."  A new twist to this challenge is that there are two kits - one for Fire and the other for Water.  Participants wouldn't know which kit they were getting until the package arrived.  How exciting!  Not only is there the element of Christmas morning excitement (at least for me) of opening the mailbox and receiving a package of beady goodies, one wouldn't know which kit they would receive until the package was opened too.  What fun!

Fire Challenge Kit full of juicy yellows and oranges

I received a Fire kit, full of juicy oranges, reds and yellows.  I usually don't design with these colors, especially orange, but I gotta tell ya, I absolutely loved the kit!  I remember reading long ago that being a Leo, I'm a "fire sign" and that yellow and orange are "my colors".  I haven't thought of that for years, but I suppose there must be some truth to that because I really was drawn to the fiery colors of the kit.

I messed around with the beads not really settling on any specific design.  I made some earrings, then strung the Carnelian chips onto the wax linen for a necklace, but kept thinking of how to represent "Fire" for the competition.  I guess it was the whole Leo Astrological information that kept coming back to me, but I decided I want to create a sun for the Fire challenge.  The large lucite(?) bead has swirls of dark red, orange and yellow in it so I thought that would be a perfect center for my sun.  I scoured the wire making books I have on hand and found Kelly Tibbetts' design for her Avenging Angel pendant in Wire Jewelry Start to Finish by the publisher of Bead & Button magazine.  I must admit that I have many books and magazines for jewelry making but I usually fall short of actually trying the projects shown.  Anyway, Kelly's design looked like half a sun to me, so I practiced the technique until I actually "got" the rhythm of the wire pattern.  I continued making smaller then larger rays, alternating the lengths in somewhat of a random pattern to form the corona of the sun.

When I finished the sun pendant, I tried different cords and chains but settled on a combination of chain and orange and yellow small round beads from the kit to tie in the oranges and yellows of the sun. When I was playing around with the beads I made a "flame" clasp, so I added that to the Sunburst necklace adding a vintage yellow orange bead I had in my stash.  Here is my competition piece:

Fiery Sunburst Necklace for Allegory Gallery's Fire & Water Competition Challenge

Close-up of Sun Pendant

Fiery Sunburst Necklace

Carnelian Chip Necklace

Carnelian Chip Necklace

Earrings using the juicy yellow and orange beads from the kit

Yellow and orange beads from the kit with Czech glass and sun charms

Thanks for joining me here.  Don't forget to stop by the Allegory Gallery Design Challenges page on Facebook to see what everyone else made.