When mistakes take you to an even better place!

So my hand is finally better (knock on wood, cross your fingers and all that!), and I am back with a bang :-)

9 new designs in 15 days! I did not have this pace even before the trouble with the hand started :-)
I have to say my friends are responsible for it...so many of them inspired me to make something for them...otherwise I would be still wondering what to do!
So thank you, Michelle, Shelley, Shefali, Bhavna, Divya and Saritha!

Here's a collage of this first wave of jewelry (yeah, some of them are sideways, I know, deal with it :p)

I have a few other things lined up..folks waiting for things and all, so I hope to keep up this momentum.

But...coming to the point of this post...the mistake.

Ever since I learned how to make my first spiral, I wanted to make a spiral headpin. Not the simple kind where the spiral hangs down. The kind where it acts like a bead cap and the beads sits on it.
So I tried making that today...after a cursory glance at it in Kerry Bogert's book "Rustic Wrappings" (ordered it from Amazon, and they sent me Thomas and Friends train instead, when I called them, the customer service lady laughed for at least 10 seconds :-))

So anyway, I started making this spiral headpin. When I was done, the wire section that was supposed to be the "pin" part was a bit to the side instead of the center. So it would not work as a headpin. But it was a pretty spiral. So twisted it this way and that, and made....an earwire! And then another and then another. Yeah, three of them.

Here's the "good" pair

Pretty, right? I still need to finish off the ends...filing and all that.

Now the third one...the center of the spiral was not round enough, so it was not making a perfect pair. So...it became a bail instead...

 

And that's how I ended up with the beginnings of a set of earrings and necklace :-) Far better than the spiral headpin I was trying to make...

Will try that again...some other day :-) And maybe I will come up with something else yet again. 

Would love to hear your stories of how you started to do one thing and ended up with another!