Purple silk, and gorgeous garnets - a Morgan & Pink update

I wrote a little while ago about knotting with silk - an ancient technique that's still very satisfying, and produces a necklace with lovely drape and great strength. It's also great for children's necklaces, since even a breakage should mean the loss of only one or two beads, rather than having the whole lot pinging across the room! At that stage, I was beginning to move beyond using simple fine cream silk with pearls, and now I'd like to share two new designs. The first uses thick pale blue silk, with pale blue and lavender coloured czech fire-polished glass. I'm pleased with the way the thickness of the silk means that the knots become something of a feature in themselves:

The second is a more classic combination of amethyst nuggets and cream glass pearls, but I thought I'd make it more striking by using deep purple silk. Here I've chosen to knot each side of the amethyst, but not between the pearls, which helps accentuate the interesting contrast between the angular stones and the smooth pearls:

In other news I went on a Precious Metal Clay course yesterday and am very excited about using this amazing stuff more in the future. Here are two of the pieces I made during the course - the little flowers will become stud earrings once I've bought some posts to attach:

I've also made a couple of forays into good old-fashioned everyday kind of studs, and I love these garnet cabochons; they're only 4mm in diameter, but they catch the light beautifully:

Some of these pieces will be for sale in my Etsy shop by the end of the week - do get in touch if you'd like to commission something similar.

I'm linking this up to Handmade Harbour's Handmade Monday, so do pop over and see what everyone else has been up to...