I’ll also FINALLY be adding a new category for new items, so you can easily check what’s been added. Details soon.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Fall fashion in the last few months – heavy textures, metallic details, dark and rich meshes – it’s one luxurious season of trends this year.

According to Fashion Trendsetter, the hottest colors for the season are:

Yes, they’re very dark, but there’s good news – sterling silver is seeing a major surge in popularity with top designers and jewelers turning to the crisp, white metal as an alternative to traditional gold. Add a splash of these rich colors to a silver base and you have an elegant combination while avoiding the winter plague of black, black and more black.

For these earrings I wanted to capture the layered mesh look that’s so hot at the moment. I don’t use hoops very often, but they offer so much great space to work and seemed like an obvious choice. I chose smokey topaz and green amethyst (chocolate and endive are a big color combo trend for the year) and started wrapping them over the hoops with silver wire.

The paleness of the green stops these earrings looking too fiesta-like, while the chocolatey, smokey topaz keep them looking rich.

This was one of these designs where I wasn’t entirely sure about the finished product because it’s so far from my usual style, but everyone I’ve shown them to adores them.

I think they’re one of those designs that really needs to be worn – I like them so much more after seeing Laura rock them.

Sassy and spectacular, they’ll work with layered dresses and cardigans with lots of color, or work as a great focal point with jeans and black shirts.

See the new sterling silver, smokey topaz and green amethyst hoops here.

More jewelry is on the way!

I love pairing these two gems – the green and orange look so crisp together. Add smokey quartz and you have beautiful fall palette; add rose quartz and you have a fresh spring palette – they’re just so easy to blend.

For these earrings I wanted to create a more interesting shape than simply dropping briolettes (the drop-shaped gemstones) from silver chain, so I used a trick that jewelry designers occasionally use as an alternative – I wrapped the peridot as though they were regular round beads, so they form a sort of daisy chain.

From there I wire wrapped the citrine briolettes to spaces along the “chain” created by the peridot so they fan out a little. To finish the look I added a large smokey briolette and added the gems to these really different ear studs. From regular ear hooks or studs I thought they’d be a little off-balance. The heavier studs with the scroll details work perfectly.

See the sterling silver, citrine, peridot and smokey quartz earrings here.

To pass the time I thought I should embark on an extreme wire wrapping project, so I fired up Law & Order from the start and began wrapping multiple colored sapphire into strands.

I’d been looking at a lot of Indian jewelry, and I loved the rich and luscious designs typical of wedding jewelry. Dense strands of gemstones and gold with ornate details are just fascinating to look at. These earrings were definitely inspired by that: they’re 5″ long and each have 13 strands of sapphire, finished with tiny pick sapphire drops. I used the large rings as a way of adding some contrast to the shape, wrapping clusters of the gems to carry the design all the way up the earrings.

All up, they took me roughly 16 hours over three days – and the whole time I kept watching Law & Order!

See the Sterling Silver and Sapphire Chandelier Earrings here.

Here’s a little peak at one project that’s just about done:

I’m all excited about fusing again so there has been lots of fun with torches and hammers! More to come soon.

When I was teaching classes at The Bead Shop one of my popular sessions was hand-making small amounts of jump rings in different sizes to make a pair of spiral earrings. This pendant is the same technique, using a larger variety of rings and finished with a large ametrine drop.

Ametrine is a form of quartz and it’s labeled as such when the elements that create the colors of citrine and amethyst form in the same stone. This results in a beautiful purple and orange gem, and this one has a unique fracture through the center which gives it a green tint.

The bail is a Peruvian handmade silver piece. I like how the shape reflects the shape of the stone, and it has gorgeous etching that picks up the look of the chain.

Finally the necklace part of the design is a simple rope weave, one which I’ll feature soon in a video. It’s super dense and feels great on.

See the Sterling Silver and Ametrine Necklace here.

It’s a good idea to develop a collection of “starter sets” – keep about an inch of each weave in a standard size on a paper clip. Each time you want to make chain you can continue on from what you have, then remove the starter amount. It’s so much quicker and less frustrating than trying to start from scratch each time.

Once completed, Full Persian makes a beautifully silky rope of chain that is super-flexible. Full Persian (also known as Foxtail) is what I used to make my favorite Persian Knot necklace.

Again we’re looking at adjusting what you already know, so go take a look at Byzantine and Queen’s Link first. I’ll show you how to make another tiny adjustment to product a whole new look.

Check out the archives, or get started with Full Persian Chain Maille.

If you’ve had a chance to look at my Byzantine tutorial, you’re going to find Queen’s Link much easier than starting from scratch. In this new video I talk about the tiny difference between the two techniques, so you can get going on a new project with no fuss.

See the video and get the ingredient list.

See the free video archives.

I’ve been trying to work more with moonstone again, since I seem to have lots of it stashed away, but rarely think to pick it up. Silver and moonstone make a great combination – they’re both elements of the moon and the silvery quality of both results in really crisp, sleek designs.

One look at my beads and these earrings jumped into my head. I had planned to do them with just white moonstone, but I couldn’t resist using the silky gray stones as well. I love these!

Get the Sterling Silver Moonstone Earrings

My husband and I still argue over who came up with the idea for this necklace. Since the chain is so rope-like we started talking about how neat it would be to tie a knot in chain. I often bounce design ideas off him and he’s always excellent with honest feedback on my creations. I’d made a small stretch of it which we were playing with and he (alright, maybe I concede) suggested that knotting gold and silver together would look particularly special. A square knot seemed like the most elegant way of doing it, with either side easily distinguishable.

Until then I hadn’t worked in gold-filled rings much at all. I have always preferred the look of silver, but the concept of weaving the two together was very exciting. It turns out that 22 gauge rings with a large inner diameter basically do not exist, so buying them was out of the question. I set about making rings in silver and gold.

Lots of wire was bought and coiled over steel mandrels and, not having an electric saw, they were then hand cut with a jeweler’s saw blade. Needless to say, I threw out plenty!

While this necklace was in its early stages, we set off for Australia for a family holiday. I usually take at least one project when I travel and chain maille makes a  great traveling hobby since it requires just two pairs of pliers and the rings. I know this necklace was going to be a huge undertaking so it made perfect sense to pack all the rings and take it with me. The only down side is that I don’t like to pack my expensive, ergonomic pliers since things have a habit of walking out of checked baggage. So yes, I did the whole thing on my back-up pliers – a glorious $5 per pair set that seem designed to cause carpal tunnel syndrome.

Once I had enough of each chain (the holiday long come and gone)  I found a large, rectangular toggle clasp with two rings on either side. Using this I was able to knot the chains, then link the ends so that they had a connector ring each. The sizing worked out really well; a pure stroke of luck, so that there is very little gap between the strands. I then tweaked the lengths so that they matched and so that the knot would hang neatly.

I didn’t like the way the knot loosened when not being worn, so once the pieces were all in place I used tiny silver rings to bind some of the jump rings within the knot to other sections of the knot. The rings are just large enough to fit over two pieces of 22g wire, so they are tiny enough that they are almost invisible.

I didn’t keep track of how many hours went into this necklace. A very rough estimate would probably be over 30 hours, but short of making it again, I couldn’t really say. I love this necklace so much. It’s the kind of piece that I would be slightly happy never to sell so I could keep it and look at it now and then, but perhaps one day it will find the right home.

Take a closer look at the Sterling Silver and Gold-Filled Persian Knot Necklace.

To get started you’ll need to master making wire-wrapped bead units, then move on to the byzantine bracelet project.

Next up, I’ll show you how to modify what you know into two other weaves.