The beauty of a challange...and a giveaway!

I was BLOWN AWAY by the amazing necklace my partner Megan made. She managed to make a large turquoise focal look delicate and feminine. Take a look:

Since the Bead Soup challenge was so much fun, I decided to try my hand at the June Art Bead Scene blog challenge. This month's challenge was based upon a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec and shows a lady in a sassy outfit dancing. I don't have a ready stash of art beads, and wasn't sure if I would participate this month, but decided to see one night what kind of treasures I could find on Etsy. Man, I hit the mother lode with some pink swirly handmade glass beads from Jerri's Glass Art Beads. They couldn't be more perfect. So this morning I sat down with Jerri's beads and some olive crystals that matched the colors in the painting perfectly (loving summer Saturday mornings when the biggest thing on the agenda is pancakes and heading to the pool in the afternoon). Looking through my stash I found some copper beads, copper chain, 2 copper 3 to 1 connectors and some more green beads that I think are jade. Once all of those were on the table the necklace came together pretty quickly. I decided after it was assembled to double the chain strand because other wise it got a little lost among the other two strands. Emma, my daughter and frequent opinion giver on my designs, agreed.