O Mistress Mine

Here's a new necklace I finished last week. The quote is from the song "O Mistress Mine" which appears in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". Here's the full song:

O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear; your true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low:
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies not plenty;
Then, come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Thus, "Present mirth hath present laughter" has a similar meaning to "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" or "carpe diem" or even "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die." Needless to say, I like this iteration the best. (It's also where Noel Coward got the title of his play "Present Laughter", by the way.)

You may recall last month, that I tore my stash apart trying to find one bead. Well, that bead was actually the heart bead appearing above. I felt it would be perfect for this necklace, as it is actually double-sided. Here's the other side of the bead:



Pretty appropriate, don't you think? All of the wonderful lampworked beads are by Michele Goldstein. I kind of took apart some of her wheelie bead combinations and reassembled them for this piece, but I think the end result looks pretty good.

Actually, I've been wearing this necklace a lot since I made it, which is unusual for me. I wanted to create a piece using a long bar quote - I thought it might be an interesting challenge to balance it. I was quite surprised by how wearable this turned out to be (although I think anything longer might have been a problem). It looks good with a collared shirt and great with a square neckline. I'm quite thrilled with it, actually (she said, modestly) and have plans to create at least one or two more of the same type (but with different quotes and beads).

On other fronts, my necklace "Pacific Dragon" arrived home today, and I'm happy to have it home. It came with this:


Part of me feels that it's quite crass of me to be showing this to you, especially since I didn't actually win. However, I'm sort of so naively happy to have made the finals, I'm ridiculously pleased, so I hope you will excuse me.

Have a great day!