7th Bead Soup Bead Party - Reveal

Woohoo!!! It's finally time for the 3rd reveal of the 7th BSBP! This is my second time participating in this annual event hosted by the awesome Lori Anderson and I must say I'm definitely a more experienced participant.

My partner is Natalie Davidson from Northshore Days who is based in hobbit-land New Zealand! She sent me an almost monochromatic set of beads and I decided that this year it would be my personal challenge to use up all the beads!

My favourite beads are the candy-licious flat rounds lampwork beads with speckled orange and yellow. I don't normally work with orange or yellow (these two colours are not very friendly with the Asian skin tones) so this was a little challenge as I had to rummage through all my beads to find something to match these glass beads. Finally I remembered stashed at the back of my cupboard, is a little container of plastic orange beads which were originally part of a broken necklace and I never did get around to fixing it. So out came the oval plastic orange beads and the rest fell into place. This is actually a one-layered long necklace to pair with some simple, long tops.

To make a matching bracelet, I wanted to incorporate the orange with the black and white beads. Here's a chunky bracelet with some wire-wrapped techniques inspired from my partner's ever-so educational blog tutorial. 

Next up, I decided to use the white shell bead. I knew I wanted to make this piece simple and elegant, so I ended pairing it up with some tiny, black korean crystals and I used pale gold spacer beads (leftovers from BSBP6) to highlight the bracelet.

Several weeks on since I made the three pieces, I was still stuck on the main point of BSBP. I could not figure out a nice technique on how to attach pendant to a necklace chain. Wire-wrapping didn't work because it obscured the beauty of the pendant, a big jump ring was just really odd etc. Believe me, I went through several trials and errors before I came up with this solution! 

In the end I used a thin bronze chain of appropriate length to attach the pendant to the toggle clasp which I thought was pretty enough to be shown-off in the front. With the chain, the pendant still rolled and moved around too much so I used a pink organza ribbon bow to secure the chain and prevent too much movement. To dress up the whole necklace, I created a fruity selection of beads to hang through part of the necklace chain.

This was a real challenge for me but I'm very pleased with the results and can't wait to hear what you think of this design!

So remember my ambitious challenge to use up all the beads? Well, I still hadn't figured out what to do with the red glass beads. I was about to just give up when lo and behold, Lori announces that the 3rd reveal would be delayed! Hmm... this must be a sign. So about two or three weeks ago, while scooting through some blogs, I hit again on my previous BSBP partner Adlinah from DreamStruck Designs blog. I had previously already seen her posts and all but this time the picture of the soup she sent to her partner struck a chord with me. The colour scheme is absolutely beautiful and I loved her idea of pairing red with the baby blue beads. I also noticed that Lori's banner of the Bead Reveal Dates also feature a bead soup in similar colours!

I then decided to do a colour-block bracelet using the gorgeous red beads Natalie sent me, pairing them up with some turquoise round beads from my own stash. The result - my favourite design from my own BSBP7 creations!

The bead soup Adlinah sent her partner and the picture that inspired my colour-block bracelet.

I had matching nails the same week I created this bracelet!

I do still have a couple of beads left over but overall I think I achieved my goal of using up most of the bead soup ingredients. I also realized that while I created so many pieces, none were particularly creative so maybe that's the trade-off. Hopefully next year I will be able to make more creative pieces to showcase.

As usual, a big round of applause goes to Lori Anderson for hosting and organizing the 7th BSBP , my partner Natalie for providing such an enjoyable bead soup and Adlinah for providing inspiration even when she didn't know it!

Now that I'm finally done, it's time to blog hop!
Please head on over to NorthShore Days to have a look at what Natalie created with the bead soup I sent her. I'm intrigued because I know I sent her quite a challenging soup...

I'll be hopping around throughout the weeks ahead and I hope to see you along the way..!

The list of the other blogs involved in the 3rd Reveal can be found here.