My Winter Beach Bracelet

This bracelet has been a long time coming...

if you want to skip the "long time coming" story you can just scroll down to the bottom of the post

and definitely don't click on any of the links, your tea will go cold ;)

It all started with a Twitter conversation with Victoria over at Endangered Trolls back in February this year.

John Greed, a jeweller from the UK, were running a Blogger competition and Victoria suggested I post an entry, which I did, to read my entry you can click here to open it in a new window.

I didn't win but I really enjoyed writing the post and I became obsessed with creating the Winter Beach Bracelet I'd written about.  Firstly I needed a good* Rocky Beach Kit, I knew exactly what I wanted and was fortunate enough to find them as one kit.

*good is subjective: there is so much variation in this production kit that it's worthwhile seeing it first (whether in person or asking the seller/retailer to take photos for you).  What I was looking for in my kit were "gritty" examples of the beads that would evoke the type of beach I wanted to capture in my bracelet and from my original blog post.

I decided to make a leather version first, as buying the blue green version of the leather bracelet sparked off an idea, you can see that post if you click here.  I was also trying to cut down on my spending and knew I would need a lot of new beads to complete my idea.

I had no idea when I wrote that blog post what it would lead to... I had quite a few requests to blog a tutorial for that bracelet and leather bracelets generally, that tutorial can be found by clicking here.  The post proved so popular, to date it still has the largest hit count of my blog, predominately because it featured first on TrollbeadsUS both on Twitter and Facebook and then got picked up by several retailers' pages.

My long term plan was to create a full silver bracelet by picking up the different elements I wanted over time.  From my long term wishlist for this bracelet I acquired the Redbalifrog silvers, some great production beads with a twist, a lovely agate dendritic which was just how I imagined it would be (that was a long search for the right one) and a faceted Green Jasper... only this is where you should always be prepared to deviate from your original plans.

My mock up Winter Beach bracelet

I did a quick mock up to show off the newer beads but I was never 100% happy with it.

So it was dismantled as I went back to the drawing board.  In the meantime I'd picked up another Labradorite from a friend, and then the last piece slotted into place.  I picked up Crab via one of the recent sales.

Suddenly it all came together, I ditched a lot of my original ideas, including what I thought were key pieces of my design and NOW I finally have my silver Winter Beach Bracelet.

I've been wearing this for a couple of weeks now and the photo doesn't do it justice, it's such a lovely bracelet that goes with bright colourful summer dresses as well as looking good in the office or out and about with jeans and a t-shirt.

This one may even make it into my rare don't get broken up collection of bracelets.