The Snake Project

A little while ago my mojo was a little stagnant so I decided to put out a challenge on my Facebook page. The challenge was to throw me a challenge :)

All too often your own ideas are too easy to bring to life, so I though someone elses idea might kick my mojo back into action.

I got a good few suggestions, but decided to go with a lady called Karen whose suggestion was this:

"I love snakes and am always on the lookout for related jewellery + items. What about something with a serpentine theme, even if it is just abstractly related like a snake's eye or something? :)"

So a snake it was, and I got to work.

First of all the planning, I didn't want to just string, I wanted to put a lot of time and effort into it.

I took some lilac glass pearl beads and taking three at a time I made a netted cage for them out of seed beads in clear and navy blue. These little cages took 25 mins each to make and I ended up making 18 of them.

The head was tricky, I knew how I wanted it to look and how I wanted it to work. In the end I just sewed row after row, increasing and decreasing, and somehow it worked! I added a little tongue just to make him extra cute.

I strung it all together on tigertail beading wire, alternating each netted trio of beads with a glass flat bicone bead to give it some movement. Near the end of the tail I left a link out and added a simple row of small bicones, this was to be the bit where the snakes mouth clamped onto as a clasp.

Into the snakes mouth I sewed a strong magnet clasp.

He grips his tail really well now .

In total this piece cost around £6.00 in materials, but in time he took around 9 hours to complete, so at a minimum wage of £5.80 an hour, I reckon he would have to be sold at £60.00!

But I don't want to sell him, no, he is going to be slithering away to his new home very soon and I will be sorry to see him go, we have grown quite close :)

Hope you like him Karen :)