Design #3- Handmade Designer Necklace of African Beads, Vintage Murano Beads and Kingman Mine Turquoise

Well, I am finally satisfied.

My friend gave me a strand of large, black ceramic beads with an incised pattern including the one in the center of the necklace shown above.  She was working in Liberia, and purchased them there, but was not sure where they were made. I was told by an expert on African beads that they could be from Mali or Burkina Faso.

Jan .21 2010 was the first blog about these beads. It showed  them combined with large brass beads and amber colored beads from Tibet.   It was o.k. but not exciting.

I tried again combining the large beads with ebony beads with inlaid silver, frosted white Vintage Murano glass beads, and turquoise spacers from the Kingman mine in Arizona.

The new materials were an improvement but the necklace remained too clunky. See March 4 2010 blog.

It took awhile to realize the materials and colors were good but the design needed to be simplifed.  By removing two of the large beads, and some of the frosted beads the problem was solved.

Justice was done to my wonderful gift and it is finally a well designed necklace.  Hope you like it!

Handmade Designer Necklace - Gemstones of Lapis and Variscite, Spiny Oyster and Vintage Murano Glass

The color combination in necklace above was inspired by  Native American jewelry. The colors in this necklace are the analogous colors of blue, green  and turquoise with orange as a contrasting color.  It works!


The long beads are lapis lazuli . I think the lapis in the necklace above is from Afghanistan. It is a clear bright blue and has tiny specs of pyrite in it .There are three round vintage satin finished blue Murano glass beads, and rondelles of turquoise, green variscite, and orange spiny oyster.

The Spiny oyster is a genus of  bivalve mollusk called spondylus. It comes in red, orange, purple and rarely yellow.  It is harvested from the Sea of Cortez , Baja Mexico. I love the orange color shown above. It is relatively expensive, so I use it infrequently.

The variscite is a phosphate mineral found in Utah and Nevada in the USA, Queensland in Australia, Germany and Brazil.  It is a wonderful shade of medium blue green. Variscite is hard to find.  This too is used infrequently.

Native American Jewelry can  be seen on the website www.pueblodirect.com .  They describe themselves as"highest quality Native American Arts at the very best prices. The jewelry looked high quality to me.
The necklace pictured above may be purchased by sending a request through the comment section of this blog.  Price is $295