Saturday, October 31, 2009

31.10.09 Celebrating 3 years of Beading with a Kizhi Pendant Reproduction!!!

28-31.10.09
The story starts when I wanted to update myself, getting some news from my dear friends' blog, Svetlana Eltsova. However, there were no new posts on her blog. Since this blog is a sea of fascinating data and pictures, I said to myself "why not visit some older posts that I didn't have the time to read in the past?" and so I did. When my eyes encounter the post called "Inspiration from the Past (Antique earrings)"about popular earrings wore by women in Russia, in the 18th -19th centuries, I was HOOKED! I started looking over all the links and searching for more data about it over the net. Unfortunately, I don't know Russian, but I still managed to find few interesting pictures and links thanks to Svetlana. I decided I was going to reproduce those Earrings you can see in the following pictures:

taken from here.taken from here.

I throw myself into this project and finally found again a strong passion to solve how I can make these earring only from seed beads but as close as the original ones (the original ones are made with Fliz findings, pearls, diamonds and horse hairs!). This passion closes a circle when 3 years ago, quiet at the beginning of my beadwork steps, I discovered the amazing Hojas Necklace from the Saraguro which made me so excited about it.
In this project I used toho thread with 15/0 Japanese sb, 11/0 Czech Jablonex sb and some pearls I bought for my wedding jewels last year.
I am quiet satisfied with the result which took tones of hrs (I think about 20 with all the trial and errors, but I didn't count).
When it was done, I discovered it would be too big for an earring and it took so much time that my lazy voice lead me to decide it would be just a pendant. So for the moment, this is a pendant :-) I may change my mind though ;-) since I can tell you Varda's daughter put it near her ear few days ago and it looked fantastic on her, very bridal too. Let me know what do you think.

Dear Svetlana, THANK YOU for giving me inspiration from your work and fascinating posts! KIITOS!