5x5 Follow-up and Prize Winner Announcement!

Thanks to all of you who visited my blog and the other participant's blogs to get the behind-the-scenes look of our "5x5" Beat Chat metal testing!  I know it was a lot of reading but I hope you enjoyed seeing how we experimented repeatedly, how we cumulatively hammered, soldered, cut, glued,  tied, twisted, wired, punched, painted, patinated, bent, beaded, bejeweled, and more these pieces of metal!   


At the bottom of my last blog post was a Give-away offer!  Hope you made it that far!  All you had to do was leave a comment regarding the 5x5 event to be entered.  Hopefully you also left a way for me to reach you if you win!    The names of those leaving comments went into the drawing and the winner was  randomly selected by a random-number-generator.   

Before I announce the winner, I have to tell you, that it was difficult to quit fiddling with the jewelry even after we submitted the items for publication in the Bead Chat Magazine!   At the end, I asked the advice of my co-designers on several pieces and have been working on some of the suggestions I received.   

Sometimes it has been  difficult to know if I would have been better to have stopped 5 steps back or whether I needed to go 5 steps further.  Sometimes it depends on taste.  Sometimes it's just good design. One thing was for certain, I had one piece stuck between 2 worlds and felt I had to move it out of that state!   

I'll show you what I mean, and I hope you like the end result, because this will be the give-away gift.

You may recall this piece.   The top copper piece, without the stampings, was what we were given.  This started out as one of my favorites and, after a long struggle, I think I've finally made my peace with it again! 

At the start, I made the brass piece to go with it and stamped designs in both pieces.   Now many of you know, I have a love-hate affair with bright shiny metals.  Mostly I love them, but I know they don't easily stay that way.  They age and darken,  so aging the metals is more popular, and I like that too.   What happened to this piece was that it was a victim of my indecision!  

I decided to age the copper piece and add some green and blue color to it.   And suddenly I realized that between my metal and wire, I had silver, copper, and brass  in both bright and antiqued finishes.   And then it got worse before it got better. I made attempts to lessen the brightness of the brass. (I'm telling you the brass was so bright, I kept getting a reflection of myself with the camera when I tried photographing the necklace for the blog!)   

But once I tamed the brass, then the shiny silver stood out like it didn't belong.   So finally, it took it all apart... one more time...  

Applied more patina colors to the brass piece.  Removed all the silver wire work at the top, the dangles and the clasp.   I replaced the shiny silver clasp with a darker handmade  copper one. The dangles I replaced with  green beads with an aged look (stone, glass rondelles, glass picasso daggers, and brass accent beads).    It's a long way from where I started, but to me it feels like all the parts come from the same time period now, though a much more ancient one.  

I hope you like it.   And I hope the winner does too:

Kathy Lindemer

(If not, Kathy, you are welcome to change it in any way!  That's what this project was all about from the beginning!) :-)

Thank you all for participating and for your support!

~Sharyl

P.S.  Thanks once more to Heather Kelly Martson, Melinda Orr, Alicia Marinache, and the other 4 Testers!
------------------------------------------------

Images:

All images are photographs taken by Sharyl with exception of the ticket graphic:

http://www.wpclipart.com/recreation/entertainment/tickets/.cache/movie_tickets_admit_one.png

------------------------------------------------