Spectacles Chain - Not this time!

I've been working on a large collaborative project for some weeks now and having finished the original piece, it's now just a matter of completing duplicates for the other participants, so I'm working on them production-line fashion. It's definitely the quickest, but also the most tiresome way to complete them so I've taken a break to have some fun making Friendly Plastic beads.

My original plan for these beads was to make them up into a spectacles chain to hang off my glasses. At home I'm always careful to put my specs down in the same place so I know exactly where they are, but when I'm teaching, I have a terrible habit of taking them off and putting them down and then being unable to remember where. Just ask anyone who has done one of my classes!

But anyway, back to the beads. Somehow, they feel too big for a specs chain - I'm sure they would keep catching my eye as they swayed around. So I decided to turn them into a necklace instead.I'm really happy with the combination of wire and beads in this piece. There are 3 different coloured metals in the necklace: copper for the serpentine connectors, gold for the bead caps and rose gold for the closure. Strangely enough, I think it works quite well.

I've played with the wigjig and wire before - together they create such great little connectors and focal pieces. But in this piece I used some new toys, I mean tools, that I treated myself to: a chasing hammer and anvil. This is the first time I've played with them and I had so much fun that I decided to form the chain from wire too. An hour or so later and all my components were formed, flattened and ready to put together.

I'd been wanting to try hammering metal wire for a long time but I was worried that it would be noisy and hard to do but with this lovely soft 20g copper wire, not only was it a breeze but it was therapeutic too. I will definitely be trying this again!