Re-stringing: Improvement?

I found I wasn't wearing my bracelet from the Bead Soup Blog Party.

There were 2 main reasons for this:
1. It was too long for my wrist, and kept falling off.
2. The beads seemed too randomly placed, and unbalanced with regard to sizes and weights.

Actually it was quite good that I wasn't wearing it much, because the sky-blue thread it's strung on is quite slippery and the knots tend to undo themselves unless glued (which at that stage I was not doing). So I could have lost all the beautiful beads.

Original bracelet design. Gorgeous beads. But, to be honest, they could have been arranged a bit better.

So: lots of reasons to re-string it. Here is the new version.

Restrung onto double-length cord - no new beads, but immediately a different look.

The first decision I took was to string it onto double-length cord, and tie overhand knots between beads, so that you can see the lovely sky-blue colour of the cord. Learning from my millefiori bracelet, I decided to attach the knot onto the ring part of the clasp, not the toggle-end, because the toggle-end of the cord gets a lot more stress placed on it and needs to be as flexible as possible.

Then I realised that this double-length design meant that I could now string the smallest beads - the turquoise glass and the silver seed-beads - in parallel, rather than in series.This really changes the look of the design and I like it. Might start working with seed beads in their own right a bit more, rather than just using them as spacers.

The extra length given by the new knotted design (despite doubling up on the smallest beads) allowed me to remove all but two of the glass pearls to give a more balanced design. Now they don't seem to dominate all the others quite so much.

The silvery-coloured thing in the top right of the photo is a pewter leaf-shaped charm. My son sweetly made me a simple mobile (or a hanging ornament) using another leaf charm just like this, combined with silver-plated wire bent into an interesting shape, and hung on a piece of string. So now the leaf charm reminds me of him and his intense curiosity about the world. The disadvantage, however, is that he constantly suspects me of having taken apart his mobile to make my bracelet, and he keeps demanding I get it down for him to inspect and check that its leaf charm is still there.

What do you think? Do you prefer the new design, or the old one?