I've never been able to decide if my favourite colour is green or blue. If I decide on blue, I always regret sidelining the hues of fresh leaves, deep forests and oceans, jade, emerald and Connemara marble. Similarly, if I plump for green, that excludes all the shades of sky and sea, sapphire and lapis lazuli. What a good job there are endless variants of turquoise, which mixes them both! Among my stitching friends we all seem to have our go to colours for stitching and left to my own devices I will almost invariably gravitate to the green-turquoise-blue spectrum.
I really enjoy making what I call my 'mandala' brooches and pendants and before Easter we had a couple of sessions making some at In The Stitch Zone. I'd sold all the ones I'd already made so it was the perfect excuse to make another with a base of the most delicious piece of teal-turquoise silk dupion. I had to get both the front and back out of the silk, and it literally was just a scrap, so this is the biggest I could make it. I didn't want to obscure the fabric too much, so the simple design was led by the five-fold symmetry of the brass cog I stitched in the middle. I added bead caps, French knots, seed beads, and unusual twisted links from a broken chain to make a dainty star and then echoed the points with a beaded picot edging featuring gorgeous iridescent peacock turquoise delicas.
I finished it off with a large odd chain link for a bail and a reclaimed vintage gold tone chain and you can find it here in my Etsy shop.
I enjoyed making this mandala pendant so much, I literally went straight into a second, this time working with an even smaller scrap of peacock-blue velvet. I bought a load of random metal detecting finds several years ago with the intention of making them into upcycled jewellery and I was running my hands through the bowl in which they live when two rings caught my eye - one old and hand forged and almost the shape of the 'eye' of a peacock feather and the other smaller and machine made. One offset inside another with an odd coin-shaped mother of pearl bead...
Once I'd stitched them down with a variegated thread that combined greens and turquoises with some of the patina of the metal (treated with micro-crystalline wax so it stays stable) I didn't want to add much more: the border of roughly faceted marcasite beads was enough of a finishing touch.
Looking through the bowl of metal oddments again, I found what I think is probably a metal button with a similar patina which works perfectly as a bail.
This one hangs from a new thong with sterling silver mounts and can be found here in my Etsy shop.
I'm toying with the idea of creating kits for people to create their own Mandala brooches or pendants. As well as the usual bits: instructions, fabric, pelmet vilene, hoop, threads, needles, beads etc, I'd also include one of my 'Magpie Packs' to give people a selection of random odd, broken and unusual bits they can stitch into patterns. What do you think?
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