Virginia gettin' "blingy" wit it.

February's challenge was fun.  The challenge was to find an expensive, designer piece of fashion jewelry and remake it for a lot less than it's sold for.  I looked at the department stores and online.  I ended up on Nieman Marcus' site perusing the designers they display.  Since I've never set jewels and well, that would have been a cumbersome task to complete and acquire tools, I stuck with beaded pieces.  I also wanted to choose something I would wear in the end.  I chose a piece by Devon Leigh - Multi-Strand Necklace.  So who has $725 for jewelry?  I certainly don't.

Her's was cream, red, black, gold and brown accents and I chose to do a jade, black, brown & gold.  Those colors are more my style and finding the exact beads to match would have cost a lot more since bone and carved shell is pricey.  As I wanted to support a more local and privately owned business I went to Sea of Beads.  They have a pretty nice selection of beads at pretty reasonable prices.  It took me about 45 minutes to an hour pick my string, beads, toggle closure and pendants.  Two things I purchased and didn't use were coral beads and three carved bone leaf pendants.  I opted to re-purpose an old pair of earrings which my gold pendants and matching earrings came from. I couldn't find the wood accent pieces that had 7 holes.  They only had ones with 2 to 5 holes but none with 7 so I had to make those myself.

As 1 don't have a wide selection of power tools I used my Dremel to cut the pieces, sand them down to size and drill holes.  The piece of wood I used was left over from when I made shelves in Amelia's old room in Pennsylvania.  I'm very surprised it made it down here and glad it did.  It's taken a long ride all the way from New Zealand from where it was made, Pennsylvania at Lowes where it was purchased, then to Texas.  That's over 10,300 miles of traveling. 

First I cut off the length of wood I needed, then I cut that in half lengthwise using Dremels Point Structured Tooth Tungsten Carbide Cutter.  I needed four total so I had to cut the two pieces in half.  Now that I had four pieces I sanded them into a nice shape to that would fit my necklace just right.  Now to drill 7 holes evenly was more difficult without a drill press attachment.  To make the wood spacers took about two hours total. 

So all that was left was to string it all together.  I used approximately the same amount of beads as the Devon Leigh necklace.  This took about two days sitting 2 hours at a time.  So on my fourth & fifth day of working on the necklace it took some time to figure out the enclosure.  I knotted by hand each end and I wanted a closure to be a little more different the Devon Leigh necklace.  You can actually see the enclosure when you wear it and a longer decorative piece dangles on your back.  


Day six I took apart the earrings and made the pendants that dangle from the necklace.  I had left over pieces from the old earrings, so I decided to make matching earrings.  


Now to talk about the price.  The original design by Devon Leigh sold at Nieman Marcus was sold for $725.  Everything I used for my necklace came roughly to $62 not counting things I already owned.  And there you have it!  


I didn't win this one but what I ended up with in the end was prize enough for me.  I am pretty proud with what I made and can't wait to wear it.