A Midsummer Night's Dream

One of the things that I love about Etsy is the inspiration that's inevitable anywhere artists gather.

I get so much inspiration from the EtsyBeadweaver's Team. The EBW Team is made up of bead artists who aspire to successfully market their beadwoven creations on Etsy.com and elsewhere. As such the EBW Team has two areas of focus:1) Practical business help, including sales promotion by networking, marketing and creating awareness of beadweaving as an art. 2)Artistic inspiration, instruction and encouragement.

We have monthly themed challenges which push me to learn new techniques and to try things that I normally wouldn't.

A case in point is this months challenge theme, A Midsummer Night's Dream. I automatically thought of Michelle Pfeiffer's Titania. Pfeiffer's calm ethereal beauty was perfect for the role. (She's also *the* Catwoman in my book. Yeah, but that's another post.)

I'd had an idea for a previous challenge but opted to do something else instead. The idea was a black netted cuff with red/orange crystal accents. Now I wanted to do a necklace instead of my usual cuff and for Titania all I wanted was white-- different for me, as I use a lot of color, lots of neutrals and blues. Also for Titania I wanted something as ethereal as the fairy queen herself, so I wanted something very unstructured. Freeform! Now we're talking!

I love freeform!

A few false starts later and I got the hang of the netting, which is so much easier said than done, especially when you aren't working off a base thread. Add an extra crystal here and there and a closure and there it was. A crown-like crystalline choker. All moonlight and dewdrops. A Midsummer Night's Dream.