Summer stacking bracelets

I had lots of fun looking at the Wrapped Stacked Layered Bracelet Challenge blog-hop recently - it was so inspiring seeing all the creativity out there. But at the time I really didn't think I could ever make anything co-ordinating without becoming excessively matchy-matchy, which really isn't my look. There was also a lot of stuff with sari-silk and highly complex designs which were clearly waaaaay beyond my capabilities. But! But! Look at what I made!

This is the story of how it happened. It was sunny, and I was off work, and while my little son napped sweetly on the sofa, I started to dismantle a Christmas necklace I'd made. I loved how the silver beads in that Christmas necklace were now starting to get a little bit tarnished - you can't see it so well in these photos, but they're not shiny-bright silver any more, they look a little bit speckly and battered and altogether much more interesting.

Suddenly I realised these slightly-tarnished beads really, really needed to go with some animal-horn beads that I'd bought ages ago in Brighton. The bracelet wasn't quite long enough, so I added some colour with lampworked, green-blue little glass beads and some subtly speckled dark-green ones. Because the lampworked beads are handmade, they suit the irregularity of the horn beads.

I liked this so much, I immediately decided to make another with the last of my turquoise-y beads (also slightly irregular in size), with a red Czech glass heart for colour-contrast and some interesting brassy beads that had come from a find some time back from the antiques market. The technique I used for the heart dangle was the same one that I discovered worked well for the re-done leaf-dangles.

Then I realised these two bracelets could actually go together! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I can stack and layer!!! (Although, I still can't wrap with sari silk, mainly due to not actually having any sari silk, but that's a whole other challenge, right?).

And the weight of the dangles means that if you wave your arms around a bit, the bracelets tend to align with each other in the same way each time... which is kind of satisfying.