Playing with old(ish) jewelry

I treated myself to a new goldenrod-colored sweater last week, and a pair of argyle socks to match, and as I was driving home from Target, I was doing what any other jewelry designer would do – taking a mental inventory of my necklaces, trying to remember if I had anything to match my new sweater.

I did, as it turns out.  A few of the necklaces I made after Julie Picarello’s class last April were a perfect color and I hadn’t sold them yet.  Still, I wanted something a little more interesting, like the dangly necklaces I’ve been making that have the clasp in the front and a little cascade of glass beads that jangle around as you walk.

Luckily, it’s a relatively simple thing, to take a necklace like I had and turn it into a necklace like I wanted.  In fact, I did it on the other two necklaces I still had left from that time, too.

It’s fun to breathe a bit of new life into something,when all you need to do is add a couple of extra components.  It makes me want to dig through my little box of clay tiles that I never bothered to turn into anything.  There are so many potential earrings and necklaces in that box!

I must resist, though. My creative energy needs to go into a little bit of Christmas knitting I’m doing for the boys, and some coffee cup cozies the boys and I are going to be making for their teachers – it seems to me like a good collaborative project: they can pick the fabrics and the buttons, and they can cut out the pieces.  All I need to do is sew it all together and buy the Starbucks gift cards to slip inside them.

(“All I need to do,” she says, as if she isn’t teetering on the verge of a good old-fashioned week-before-Christmas freak-out…)