Faux Wood Stuff

Hi Everyone
I did have a productive day yesterday, starting a new collection of work based on a 'wood organic shape' theme. The idea behind the collection comes from a small piece of wood found in my garden. I'm not sure where it came from but I originally thought it was a button. The little piece of wood is an organic flat-ish almost round shape.



The wood has since dried out and gone very hard in places but a bit crumbly on one edge. It's not quite the piece I found but the inspiration stayed with me and I can now reinvent it forever ! (or for a while anyway).
Here is a quick look at the beginnings of the collection :



I didn't want the new beads to copy the piece of wood but I took the lines of the inner circles and developed a similar organic shape. I will develop more clay mixtures to add additional shapes and shades of 'wood'.



The last photo is the beginnings of a ring using the same bead style.

I want the bead shapes to link together - somehow ?One piece will literally be fused together but I also want to develop some form of separate link for the flat beads. I will try a few things - possibly oxidised silver 'half rings' or a polymer nail like link ? I'm not sure. Ive been struggling with designing such a link for some time. I want the connection to be simple and comfortable to wear as well as secure. It's quite a challenge. Ive avoided this challenge in the past and simply redesigned a different style bead. This time I'm determined to solve this one !

The beads are currently a bit 'flat' - I want to bring another quality to the finished piece so am considering this one as I go. I'm thinking about textures.

I used my new work bench yesterday and ....... it was great. I managed to sit in front of the large window (at one end of our house) and enjoyed the low sunshine most of the day. Lovely.
I need to develop my storage but it was a good start.

Back to my new collection, I'm going to keep working on this collection and will hopefully have a name for it by the end of the day. I need to concentrate on constructing some ideas for putting the beads together. Sometimes this happens at the design stage but Ive changed things from my original sketch ideas, so we will see what happens.

Bye for today.