The square peyote stitch component featured in the February 2010 issue of Bead & Button was an instant favourite with me. If you read the article and instructions about it, you can see how versatile it is. In the magazine they tell you how to make three different kinds of bracelets with it, but my first thought was that it would be a great base for an earrings and necklace set.Something about beaded jewelry makes my egomania come out. Even though I do seem to like some classic, everyday-ish beaded jewelry that looks like it's from the 1940s-1960s, I also have this knack for making ornate stuff that's more like poor glass-bead cousins of more glamorous metal-worked pieces made for medieval royalty or something.
Today I made the earrings part of the earring-and-necklace set. I added a short dangle to the component with a matching glass drop bead. The flash distorted the colours (someday I will figure out how to photograph beaded jewelry easily so the colours come out right), but the blue beads, including the glass drops, are deep cobalt blue, while the metallic beads are a pale copper that looks more like a red gold. I used copper findings, including copper wire guards at the top of each component so that they would swing from the earring wires properly — a trick I picked up from a previous issue of Bead & Button.
The square component is dead quick to make, but it took me a couple of tries to get the finding and dangle attached in a way that pleased me. Originally I was going to use copper jump rings to attach the glass drops (ie: no seed beads), but it turned out that the jump rings I had on hand were too thick to go through the holes in the beads.
The finished earrings are a third try, but since each try took under twenty minutes, it was still quick as handmade things go.