A Rabbit in Time Necklace

Back on July 23 I posted a photo of this rabbit with the clock face and now I've finished it into a necklace.  I ran through several necklace designs in my mind before I settled on this one.  The main issue was that I wanted to incorporate a key - but what key?  I searched etsy.com for vintage keys and bought a few nice ones.  But. with the exception of this little pocket watch key, they were all too big.  Theoretically the pocket watch key should have been perfect since the watch face is from a pocket watch, but somehow the key just didn't seem to fit.

So I moved on to the necklace itself.  I picked out five colors of seed beads that I thought blended well together and picked up the colors in the rabbit, muted pinks and raw sienna.  It took a lot of time to bead all these strands but it was worth it.  I just now notice that the twisting of the bead strands picks up the cable design around and at the top of the watch face - funny how sometimes the subconscious seems to fill in the blanks while we work!

I've had a clasp for this type of twisted-strand necklace for a few years now but have never figured out how it works, so this is just my version fidged to work with a simple lobster claw clasp.  The crucial trick is that the beaded strands must be anchored at the ends so that the twist will hold.  To accomplish that, I saturated the ends of the beaded strand clusters with E6000 glue.  Then to cover the glue, I wrapped the glue blobs with strands of the sweetest little beads - cream colored Charlottes.

At that point, the little pocket watch key seemed to work just fine!  I don't know why, but why look a gift rabbit in the mouth?