Art Jewelry Elements Earring Challenge!

2012 has been MOSTLY made up of me signing up for blog challenges, and creating jewelry mainly for that. So in December, I decided that I had learned a LOT from all the challenges and now needed to step back a bit and create based on my own mood and speed and all that.

Come January, what do I do? I sign up for not one but two challenges! Yup, am nothing if not a flake! But let me explain. The reason I signed up for both of these is that they will discipline me into doing something once a week. Regularly, with focus and all that. (More on that focus coming in the next post). I am nothing if not a big excuse factory as well! 

But challenges are good things, so lets move on.

The first one I signed up for was the Focus on Life - its a photography challenge, so am still not quite breaking that promise (yup, told ya, excuse factory! Big one!)

The second one is the Art Jewelry Elements Earring Challenge. 

The idea is to create at least one pair of earrings each week, using art elements. These could be made by me (yeah, sure, as if), or some other awesome artisan. The have broken it up into quarters so its not a year long commitment if you think that's too much to handle.

I have collected a fair amount of artbeads in the last year to last me the first 13 weeks. So am good there...since I never buy supplies only for a challenge. I always, always, always use my stash.

First one up, is this pair of earrings. The art element in here is hard to miss! The beautiful polymer clay butterfly wings!

These are made by Donovan Klaaren. I know him through his wife, Jessica Klaaren, who runs the shop Cellar Door Jewels on etsy. Jessica is an awesome jewelry designer herself, and Donovan primarily made these for her. He posted some pictures of his work on Facebook, and I coaxed him into letting me have some of them too! 

Jessica has made some really pretty earrings with these wings. So I had to make sure they were not copies of what she did. She mostly used coordinating beads in her work, so I decided to use a monarch butterfly instead. I did add a small AB swarovski bead which actually has a lot of the colors in the wings.

Yup, am loving it! The earrings are available in my etsy store here:

Purple Yellow Butterfly Wings Earrings

Here's how I styled it...

Preppy Purple! by kashmira-patel

I also made a necklace with wings from the Klaarens.

Isn't he amazing! I have never seen work like this before, so am really glad he agreed to let me buy some of them.

This necklace is also listed in my etsy store: Butterfly Wings And Shells Necklace