Reveal - SJ Designs Jewelry Honey Do List June Design Challenge!

Every month, Sarajo Wentling over at SJ Designs Jewelry hosts the Honey Do List Challenge. 

What is the Honey Do List Challenge, you ask? It's where her husband, Eric, issues her a beading challenge--with the intent that she both use up some of her bead stash and get out of her comfort zone. Luckily for me, she lets others play along, too! 

This month's inspiration was a photo of a grosbeak:

Here is what Eric said about the inspiration:
This spring I've really been taking a lot of bird pictures and wanted to use one of these shots for this month's challenge.  I thought this rose-breasted grosbeak would be an interesting subject due to the stark black and white colors with a pop of bright red.  Try using this color combo for a piece!

For this challenge, instead of focusing on the bird (mainly because I've actually run out of different bird beads/charms in my current stash, and was trying not to buy anything new), I decided to take Eric's suggestion and focus on the color combination.

Luckily for me, I had some beads left over from last month's We're All Ears challenge that fit the color scheme perfectly!

Paper beads made from a sofa advertisement...
who knew that they would match the colors of a rose-breasted grosbeak?

Since I was going to Maryland for part of this month, I packed up my tools and some coordinating beads... And, like I did back in March, I started playing around with necklace designs while on vacation. You can even see some of my mum's paper-crafting supplies in the background while I was playing with different ideas:

I went through so many design drafts while working on this challenge. When packing, I hadn't included a focal to go with the beads... and recently, I have very much been using focals as the springboards for my ideas. 

Eventually, however, I finally settled on this design:

The materials include crystal (black), shell (white), coral (red), and the paper beads (of course), all wire-wrapped together with 22 gauge aluminum wire. 

For the focal, I went with a chainmaille love knot... the interweaving of the rings reminded me of a stylized bird nest, so I thought it matched the inspiration picture quite well. Besides, I didn't have a focal with me--but I had many sizes of jumprings! :)

  
I also made three pairs of earrings to go along with this challenge--two from the same batch of paper beads, and one with different materials altogether.

That last pair is made with howlite, coral, and custom-shaped ebony drops... light-weight and elegant, and a variation on the red-white-brownblack theme.

All in all, I made four pieces for this challenge... Here they are, all together:

Thank you so much for stopping by to see what I made for this fun challenge... and, as always, thank you so much to Sarajo and Eric for letting me play along! Be sure to check out Sj Designs Jewelry blog to see what everyone else made!

Have a wonderful week, everyone!