We've been having some lovely warm weather here and we took advantage of it on Sunday to head to the Indiana dunes. We took a long walk up and down the beach and found some rocks to pick up and a piece of beach glass.
We also found several beach spirits, which we left. (Beach spirits are rocks in which we see faces. The most striking this weekend had two round crinoids (fossilized worms) for eyes, a canted nose and a mouth even more to the side. He looked very much like the face of a Hopi Kachina or art from Native Americans from the Pacific Northwest.)
We both spied the stone above at the same time and both saw the same thing--a forest. I mentioned making a beaded bezel for it but Steve thought that would be too much hard against hard and would clash. I had been thinking dull beads not shiny, but I saw his point and think he was right (he usually is). He suggested cloth or fiber of some sort and we sat a long time at the beach (away from the water--near the water it was like standing by an open freezer door) as I contemplated the reeds and grasses and wished I knew a bit more about basket making.
After we left the beach we went to a great bead shop, Bluestem Beads in Chesterton, Indiana. There I found a spool of hemp cording and brought it home to work a bezel for the stone. (Dinner was VERY late.)I used knotless netting (aka detached buttonhole, not nalbinding) to create my bezel and just some knots for the neck cord. I wasn't sure of the differences, if there were any, between the techniques, so I spent some fun time doing some research. The terms are often used interchangably and it does seem to me that knotless netting and detached buttonhole are the same, but nalbinding is definitely a different technique. BTW, visit here for some incredible knotless netting artworks by Renie Briskin Adams.
There are no glues or anything permanent (or damaging) holding the stone in place (and, as one site pointed out, the cord can be loosened, unlooped and reused--not that I'd want to do that with this cord, it was pretty stiff stuff and I made those knots and stitches tight, but, still, it's a thought.)
I wore my new necklace yesterday and felt very good all day indeed.
