This necklace was Mum's birthday pressie this year. The design is Majesty from Crystal Brilliance by Anna Elizabeth Draeger. I used 4mm capri blue AB bicones and 3mm aquamarine AB bicones. This is the third time I have worked this design. The previous colour combinations were jet/crystal satin and amethyst AB/light amethyst.
Sometimes it can be challenging to get a well focused photo of a crystal beaded piece and this was one of those occasions. There is just too much reflection for the auto focus to work. I am not a skilled photographer so I rely on the auto focus on my point and shoot camera. Fortunately I was able to get some clearer shots when I zoomed in. Although I suspect the camera was zooming in on the background rather than on the necklace.
I think my tension must be on the slack side because I find I need to run the thread through the beads twice and even then the beaded beads turn out a little squishy. The challenge with this is there are a couple of key size 11 beads where the thread can become a bit congested. It's important to have a strategy when working in a new thread so that these key beads are avoided, to keep the threads running through them to a minimum. I also found my links between the beaded beads don't have the round loop shape that the example in the book has. I'm not sure this is a bad thing because with the slacker tension there is more give in the links and I think this makes it a more comfortable necklace to wear.
