Adventures in teal and turquoise

I recently cleaned my bead stash and, not surprisingly, the majority of my beads are teal and turquoise. You'd think I would make myself something of it... but...

Last week, though, I had enough - I had a couple of calmer days: the office moved and nobody knew where anything is anymore... so I could work in the quiet of my home office and look at a strand of turquoise, rose quartz and some brown stone chips for longer than usual. The strand is one my mom sent - and it was perfectly usable: chips of stones stringed together... neah... chips stringed together? boring... I took it out for the 7000 Bracelet Hop of Hope and it was starring back at me from the table day after day. On March 1st, for the Martzishor, I got a beautiful slice of... we'll call it agate, since I don't know what it really is, in an amazing shade of... teal. Which I kept on the table for a very short period of time - now I knew how the strand will help me :)

As you know, I love crocheting - and apparently I am quite nuts for wire crocheting (half of my own necklaces are wire crochet!). This time I braided 3 strands together, no simplicity for me today :) How to get the agate slice on the braids? Hmm... it's useful I had a full week of going through so many amazing Bead Soup results... I decided to get over my initial panic of anything wired and...

Voila - it doesn't have a name yet (other than 'Adventures in teal and turquoise', of course) but it's beautiful, if I can say so myself!

And because I was in such a creative mood, after a cry of help in the facebook group, I got another quick beautiful project: following a tutorial by Keri Lee Sereika in the February 2012 issue of Crafts 'n Things magazine on pages 67-69 I made... drum rolls here and a very dramatic pause:

 

My very first ring! I have been wearing it for a full week now and I know I will have to make another one (since I messed one of the sides)... but I don't care - it is my first-born! And it has a turquoise stone :)