Rhodendrons - OUT OF CONTROL!

My rhodedendron-flower necklace design got a little bit out of hand. I guess that's quite appropriate for rhodedendrons, which come into flower so suddenly and profusely that they almost seem vulgar in the sheer amount of pink and red blossom they suddenly produce from amongst their shiny-green leaves and then drop just as suddenly, covering the grass in a glorious carpet of discarded blooms.

This is how it all happened. You may prefer to skip the text and scroll through the pictures to see how the design got progressively OUT OF CONTROL, just like the rhodedendrons do in late spring-early summer.

I had been saving some large silver-coloured rings for ages and ages, having thought that they would be handy for making a multi-strand design. But what to put on each strand? I wasn't used to dealing with more than one strand at once. So I decided that the different strands would have different sorts of beads. I used my nectarine-coloured peanut beads for the first time and realised how cool they are. But I ran out of them too soon, which is where the grey flower-type beads came in.

Peanut beads are cool, especially in this nectarine colour

I chose some co-ordinating glass pearls for the bottom section, but then ran out of those too, so the last strand had to be rose-quartz nuggets with silver-cored seed beads. Then I added a few green beads in different shades, because that felt right for a rhodedendron necklace. You have to have leaves as well, you see. These things are important.

The red and pink rhodedendron-blooms wanted to join in as dangles, because it seemed such a waste of those big silvery rings not to have extra dangles hanging from them, and anyway they went with that nice pink ceramic pendant which wasn't originally going to be in the necklace but wanted to join in the fun. So, pink and red, yay.

Possibly, in retrospect, it was at that stage that things started to get a bit excessive.

Pink and red, yay.

But then, to top it all, I decided I wanted to add some extra green sections. Why? Just because it seemed to make sense together with the other green beads I had already put in.

Extra green sections. Just because.

By now the necklace had really and truly got out of control. At this point I just gave up so here it is in all its glory. It is long. And clanky. And, um, interesting. But it does look surprisingly good with drapey, loose-fitting clothes.

And, on the positive side, I now feel I have got red-pink-green out of my system (for the time being, anyway) and feel able to be a little bit more restrained for the next things I make.