Purple Starflower Lariat

I made this a little while back - simultaneously with the Dandelion Necklace, but forgot to post the pictures! Silly me!

In case you wondered, I often work simultaneously on several items at once. Often it's because it's easier - for example if I start cutting things out of sheet metal - sometimes it's because I am stuck with a design and need to do something else for the little grey men in my head to work their magic and come up with a solution to my design crisis.

After all this, here it is:

Purple Starflower Lariat

I started off with the starflowers. These were cut from brass metal sheet (0.5mm thick) and then filed, shaped, filed some more, and then sanded so all the edges are smooth. I did the leaves in the same way.


Next, I wire wrapped beautiful purple coral beads in a saucer shape together with some teeny tiny Japanese seed beads into each of the starflowers and then wire wrapped some more of the purple coral and seedbeads for buds. I put them all together with the leaves on bits of lovely vintage brass chain.

Here is an image of the pendant on a black background.


Detail shot of a flower and leaf:


A flower in detail. You can see the wonderful effect of the oxidisation - there are pinks, purples and lots of emerald green.

Since it is a lariat style necklace it doesn't have a clasp as such, but a ring for the pendant end of the necklace to slip through. Often this means that the lariat is strangling you because the pendant is heavier than the ring, however, in this case I've added my ingenious little arresting mechanism to the ring. You can just slip and slide the chaine around the little curl inside the ring and then, to permanently arrest the chain at a certain point, manipulate the curl to hold the chain in place, or if you want more flexibility, leave the curl as it is and just push the chain down.


This lariat will be available in my Etsy shop soon. If you can't wait till then, send me an e-mail. :-)