Refreshed & Refurbished 3/16/21

The 'before' with the ratty craft wire collar

Hi Friends~ In today’s blog post I’m sharing a bit of "refresh and refurbish" of a piece I made several years ago. A few years back I joined forces with another jeweler to create a wholesale line with lots of repetitive pieces. The venture had some success but in the end I had many pieces that were returned. What to do with so many multiples? Some did sell but I had way too many pale green triangle earrings for my taste. 

So I decided to convert them. I ran them all through my quatrefoil texture plate and then did a series of alcohol inks and other dies and distressing to make it a more rustic & turquoise vibe. 

After that I use some large bore silvertone beads with a bail and created a series of dangles. 

I strung the dangles and some spacer beads on to large gauge silver colored craft wire. I wore this many many times and received a lot of compliments on it... it is definitely a statement piece. But living in Florida where it's so hot and humid and wearing this against your skin over a period of time caused the piece to tarnish and then rust. Now, because I love this piece and want to wear it often, I decided that it needed to be refreshed and refurbished so that it would be something I’m proud of. 

I took the piece apart and proceeded to clean and resurface the tarnished and rusted areas. I then used a high-quality NIKKOLAS spray that is most often used on musical instruments. 

This will the piece sealed and it will remain pristine.  This time I decided to use a pre-fabricated stainless steel neck collar for a replacement to the craft wire. The diameter of the collar was too large for the spacer beads but honestly, I think it looks fine without them and I will be happy to wear this refurbished piece sometime soon. 

What do you think?

Thanks for checking me out today. Have a great week.

The flip side...see all that rust & tarnish?

One before and one after

The refurbished and sealed finale'