Complementary Rather than Matching

One of my projects in September was a client who has several necklaces that she really likes, but no earrings to match.  She does not have her ears pierced and wanted me to create clip on earrings to match her necklaces.  They are not expensive pieces, just daily wear costume pieces.  Some of these pieces she has had for a while and we all know jewelry and everything else fashion related always have fads and trends that come on go, so the challenge was to find the beads and colors to match. I actually prefer pieces to complement each other, rather than to be exact matches so I though this would be fun.  The first necklace is below:

I found a great African pattern that I used to decoupage on the back of vintage glass to echo the lines carved on the flat black and white beads.  I really liked the orange glass beads above so I found some vintage West German orange glass beads for the earrings.  Since the necklace had the beads “floating” on wire, I wanted to echo that in the earrings by crimping the beads onto wire.  The leaf-shaped beads above have an amber and black tortoise-shell look so I found some oval Czech glass beads with the same color scheme and then added some wood beads in the same color as the necklace. Here is the result:

The second necklace has Asian coins and was mostly acrylic faux yellow and green jade and carnelian.  There were actually coins missing from the necklace so I rearranged them and took two off so that I could even out the necklace and use them in the earrings.  I found some great vintage Lucite faux carnelian cabochons and used real green jade beads. While the bronze beads of the necklace are acrylic, the bronze beads on the earrings are vintage wood from a belly dancer belt.

The final necklace was the most difficult to due the color of the metal–a very washed out copper (think pink) tone with aging in the crevices and lacquered.  The beads are various shades of bronze, metallic brown, amber and a pyrite type color.

For the earrings, I hand painted some linen/silk material and decoupaged the fabric to vintage glass cabochons and mounted them on copper settings.  I found bronze and metallic chocolate beads in various sizes and shaped to add.  Here is the result:

I had a lot of fun making these and I hope you like them as much as the client did.

My October project was a jewelry holder and since I’m running a little late posting…I’ll post that one tomorrow so I’m all caught up!