The most exciting new design is a pair of earrings inspired by one of my favorite triangular Celtic knots. I'm quite excited about this one, because not only have I been trying to come up with a good way to create this knot, but I also created it by accident. Yep -- by accident! I love when accidents work out so incredibly well.
It began when I was fooling around with some oval jump rings that I'd received in an assorted batch of sterling jump rings. Up until recently, I didn't have too much use for oval jump rings. But, I decided to see if I could come up with a neat new earring knot design with these. And ... well, I did. I put 3 rings together and laid them on my work bench. While fussing with how they were arranged when laid flat, the Celtic design began to become apparent--it took several minutes of fiddling before what you see now was in front of me, but eventually the design popped out. Once I saw it, I knew I had to figure out how to make it stick.
I carefully moved the design to my soldering block, and quickly applied solder to the joints, because it is very easy to lose the design when moving the interlocked jump rings. Within a few minutes, I had both knots in hot pickling solution. From there, it was a matter of just how to finish the design--do I just add posts? Or, do I do something else?
The center hole in the design just screamed "put a gemstone here!!" So, I pulled out some earring settings for small stones, and soon found a perfect fit with a 2mm setting. I again arranged the components and applied the solder. After pickling again and a long tumbling session, the earrings were ready for stone setting. Celtic designs and green go so well together, so an emerald seemed the most appropriate. Thankfully, I have a few tiny emeralds that I'd purchased from one of my favorite gemstone suppliers in New York. A short while later, I had the finished earrings mounted on an earring card for final inspection.
I couldn't be happier with the way these beauties turned out--you'll find them in my Etsy shop for purchase today!
