Bite Me

I had two titles picked out for this Halloween-inspired project - "Love Bites" and "Bite Me". Ultimately, I had to go with "Bite Me" - the name just seemed to have more attitude. Anyway, I've gone gothic this week, with fine silver and Czech glass. This was a really fun project and completely inspired by my participation in Terrorific Tuesday this October (thank you, Alexa!). Furthermore, I created all new beads for this necklace, which I love, even though they are all quite simple in design.

This whole project arose from late night thoughts about how we sometimes use sharks' teeth as design elements in jewelry. I thought to myself, well then, why not vampire fangs? Then I thought, why not vampire fang bite marks? So, I fiddled around and came up with a few simple designs for fangs, bite marks and then I decided to do a simple bone for a toggle closure. Here's a close-up of the fangs:



As you can see, I used knotted leather cord instead of jump rings to string the fangs. I'd like to say that I planned this all along, but in fact, it turned out that I'd made the fangs a little too thick and was unable to attach them to a jump ring. As a result, I had to sit down and come up with an alternate way to string these. I like the way the leather looks - I think it adds character to the fangs. (Although, I have to say, part of me thinks this fang shape would make a great "Flintstones" or "Inuyasha" inspired necklace. Something for the future, maybe.) For the bite marks, I tried various shapes, but in the end, I found that I liked two simple joined circles the best. I filled (overfilled) the center holes with resin that I dyed a crimson color:


Finally, I shaped a simple bone for the toggle:


As far as stringing the piece goes, I had the black Czech glass in my stash already, as well as the small red drops. This past weekend was the local art center's biannual bead show, and I was lucky enough to find the deep red Czech glass beads I used here between the fangs (the beads were marked as "Oxblood" color). For the rest of the necklace, I kept the stringing quite simple so the bite mark bead would actually be visible and reasonably prominent. Of course, the bite mark bead is strung to lie along the side of the wearer's neck.

So there you have it - "Bite Me". Thanks for visiting!