ellen's wedding sparklies

My dear friend Ellen got married to the wonderful Jer this past August, and I was honoured to make her wedding jewelry for her. We designed the 3 pieces together, and shopped for the components together, too. I used the wire-wrapping technique to link together crystals between 5 links of chain, and made tiny pearl pendants hang from the 3rd link. There is a larger teardrop crystal at the front of the choker and also dangling from the lariat in the back.

The jewelry is made of sterling silver wire, real freshwater pearls, carefully selected for their size and shape, and Swarovski crystal (although the Czech crystal is just as nice and cheaper, we wanted the Swarovski for the specific size and shape).

I used the posts from my own wedding earings for Ellen's earings, for sentimental reasons, and because they were so pretty. The earings are just simple, with crystals dangling off a single chain with a teardrop shaped crystal at the end.

The necklace can be either be a choker or a lariat as the long tail can detach from the choker part. We wanted the long tail of the lariat to bring attention to Ellen's lovely dress.


The bracelet is a double strand of the same chain-cyrstal-pearl combo that the necklace is made of.


I became interested in making jewelry for myself when our apartment was burglarized... the bums stole all of my jewelry, and since it was all costume, glass and beads, it was worthless to them (if only they had looked at it before they realized that they couldn't really sell it). The tiny gold cross my sister gave me when I was 13, a pretty necklace with a tiny glass bottle filled with even tinier flowers from the south of France were among the treasures lost. Luckily I found that I really like playing with shiny things.

I'll post more jewelry that I've done soon.