Operation Remake

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In my last post, I revamped a piece of 70s jewellery for my Mum and it was a great success so today I'm tackling another piece from her jewellery box.

This set was a thank you gift from one of the shop at home catalogues that she does a lot of shopping from. It looks rather plain and uninspiring. And that was a good enough reason for me to perform some cosmetic surgery on it.

Once pulled apart, the components were a lot more appealing and I had an idea to turn this piece into a substantial cuff bracelet. Here's what I had in mind:

Now, I'm not one for drawing up my designs before I start them but I did a rough sketch for this one because I had a limited number of the lovely shiny silver tubes to work with and I needed to know how many this design would take. As it turned out, I was two tubes short, so I shelved the cuff idea and went in a totally different direction.

But the idea of framing something stuck with me. I had some pretty 5-hole flower spacer bars in my stash and after fiddling with the design a bit, I came up with a long necklace featuring a beautifully framed butterfly.

The shiny silver tubes became a tassel hanging below the frame - almost like a butterfly trail!

To tie the brown and blue of the focal together I strung faceted blue beads and copper flowers and twisted silver tubes (from my stash) to help break up the symmetry of the original design and to add a bit of a punch to the necklace.

Here's a closeup of the butterfly encased in its frame - it's almost reminiscent of a butterfly study!