Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005 - 2:55 p.m.

The Internationaly Jewelry Designers' Guild, of which I am a member, is holding a silent auction to benefit Katrina survivors. I barely made it in on time. It's called Jewelry for Katrina, and this is my submission. The event ends at midnight between Friday and Saturday, and there's some really pretty and inexpensive jewelry there, so if you're in the mood to buy, you should drop in.

For some reason, my image on the site is really pixellated and awful, so here's a better image. Click it to see a larger one.

It's one of a kind, and I wish I'd gotten it finished sooner, but writing the description and getting a decent photo took longer than I thought it would, and I had no end of trouble just getting the time to make the thing. It took me over 4 or 5 hours to make, because I used 22 guage half hard silver to attach everything but the pearls. 22 guage is too thick for the drill in the pearls, so I had to use 26 guage for those. Every freaking bit of it is wired by hand, AND I wanted it to be nice and supple, so there's a tiny 2 or 3mm soldered ring between each pearl and the smoky quartz, and that smoky quartz was *hard* to wire close to, because most of it is cut on the slant, not nice and straight. I can't tell you how many freaking pieces of wire I had to cut apart and rewrap; it had to be at least a foot. And I had to junk one piece of smoky quartz because the stone was too thin at the end of the hole (thanks to the slant) and I chipped it. :( It sucks too, because that particular piece was really pretty and clear. The quartz is really pretty and a gorgeous brown and cost me $4 a piece, when you get down to the fact that I had to shell out for a whole strand, only 4 pieces of which (3, when one broke) were clear enough to use. And the pendant piece has a great rainbow fracture* on one side, which I think is really neat, considering it's to benefit people who made it through a storm.

There are 3 pieces of smoky quartz (the two you can't see hit right about the collar bone), 4 rose quartz tubes, five 4mm cultured pearls, eight 4mm 2xAB light rose Swarovski bicones, 9 shiny sterling silver bali beads (daisies), a single sterling silver headpin, at least 14" of 22 guage sterling silver wire, at least 12" of 26 guage sterling silver wire, and exactly 12" of beautiful sterling silver chain. The whole thing is a little over 20.5" long, with a 1.25" pendant drop, and frankly, I'm pretty darn happy with how it turned out. I set a starting bid at $60, which, with labor and parts, is what it cost. (well, $62, but that would be nitpicky) ;)

* A rainbow fracture is a fracture inside the quartz which includes a vacuum, allowing a prismatic splitting of light which creates a small rainbow, rainbow ring, or pieces of rainbow to appear inside the crystal or across the face of the fracture when light hits it just right. If you click the image above, you can just see the small half circle of fracture visible near the bottom of the pendant stone, on the left side. When you look at that edge of the pendant straight on, it's actually a small round fracture that creates a very pretty rainbow ring.

Lemme know what you guys think. And get over to Jewelry for Katrina to bid on something. There's a wide range of prices over there and some neat stuff, and it benefits charities based in Baton Rouge, which is great, because the Red Cross is getting the lion's share of donations, and other charities in the area need help, too. I think I may make one another necklace or maybe a pendulum to auction on eBay and one more of something else to benefit an animal charity, Noah's Ark or the SPCA/Humane Society. I'm thinking a silk and seashell necklace with pearls and stone or glass. I'm still working on the design for that one.

Okay. Gotta go. My hands hurt from all that hideous wiring!

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