Dragon's Eye

The Short One is having trouble sleeping tonight, so, alas, I'm up. It's quite a reasonable hour of the morning right now...in Europe. Not so much in the Midwestern U.S., though. Anyway, I finished making what I intended to show you for Tuesday, so I figure that I might as well go ahead and post for the day.

A while back, I started thinking about a new concept piece based on the old hoary cartographer's phrase "Here Be Dragons". I spent some time thinking about the best way to portray a "dragon" in a fantasy necklace and nothing seemed quite right. Then, one day I was flipping through Sarah Moran's Bead Gallery and realized that if you turned her Twinkle Frond beads on their sides, they looked vaguely like eyes. After flipping through her gallery a little more and consulting with Sarah herself, I placed an order for a small set of beads which arrived last month.

Well, after so much futzing around, I finally sat down and started making the actual necklace this past weekend. Here's the first component - the eye. Lately, I've been enjoying the convenience of using commercial texture tiles with my PMC pieces. However, this time I wanted something rough and irregular looking to represent dragon scales, so I hand-carved a texture tile with a linoleum cutter. I then made a base in fine silver for the eye with this pattern. I added a dangling teardrop shaped piece of peridot. What do you think? Does it look like an eye to you? (It sort of reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, except for the color.)

After doing a couple cute and sweet pieces, I'm looking forward to making something a bit more fantastic and dramatic looking.

Okay, the SO has been quiet for almost 20 minutes. I think I'm going to go pass out myself now. I hope you have a great day.