[:en]I’ve been meaning to make a mosaic pendant for some time. It’s a great piece for using left-over beads but at the same time it requires a careful selection so that the color and size of all the beads works together. It also needs one or two larger beads that work as focal points because otherwise the finished piece looks bland.
For this mosaic pendant I used blue and purple beads with a few silver plated round beads and bali metal beads in between to add sparkle and detail. The small round beads are great to fill up gaps where larger beads don’t fit.
For the focals I used a large faceted blue bead and a shell/coil-shaped bead in a lighter blue. Together with the large oval purple bead, they form a triangular path for the eye. to travel through.
The frame is almost round but I tried to give it a bit of a lopsided look because I didn’t want the piece to look two neat. The whole point of a mosaic is that it’s supposed to be more organic looking than symmetrical.
The frame is wrapped in the same thin wire that holds the beads in place. This allows for the bail to be made from the two ends of the frame wire wrapped together, making it thicker and stronger than a single wire. It also looks cleaner than wrapping the bail with a thicker wire, in a more traditional wire wrapping sense.
The coils at the ends of the frame wire also link visually with the coil glass bead. I find these little details important even if you don’t really notice them at first.
The end result is perhaps a bit more chaotic than I would have liked and this kind of pendant works better with natural stone beads than glass beads but it was an interesting project.[:]