Crows!

For unknown reasons, it was suddenly time to sculpt crows.  And then this necklace emerged!  I made the pieces from black polymer clay coated with a mixture of interference blue and interference green mica powders.  The eggs are freshwater pearls.  Originally I was planning to pair the crows with black freshwater pearls but then decided to make everything from polymer clay and fashioned the branches and leaves.

The construction on this piece was different than what I've ever done before.  Some of the parts have a hole through them but some just have holes in the ends. I joined the pieces that just had holes in the end with short lengths of wire, small "spacer" beads, and two part epoxy glue.  As it turns out, I could very well have made all the pieces with holes and that would have been a lot easier, but this piece just planned itself.

The gluing technique will come in handy in the future for joining more irregular-shaped pieces.  And the other thing I learned on this one is that I can bend a pieces of wire inside a tube fairly radically and still pull it out after curing as long as the piece is still warm.  Good things to know!

It's been a while since I've done polymer clay and it was GREAT to get back to it.

detail of the crow on the nest