Cuff: Falling Leaves

Managed to finish this cuff up last week, but I've been a bit slow on blogging about it. I know I posted in on Facebook the moment I managed to get the photo's of it. It's been really heard to get a good picture of anything these past two weeks, the weather has been wet, dark and gloomy and the light the day provides gives the nicest photo's on jewelry in my own opinion.

Anyway!
The inspiration for this cuff actually came to me in autumn, when the leaves begin to color. I put away the materials I wanted to use for it the moment that creative muse hit me, but I decided to finish up my "Marie Antoinette" necklace before starting on something new, as it was almost done at that time.
I got the inspiration one of the days when I was walking to the bakery in the town I live in. The path is in grey stones, and there were leaves in different oranges shades all spread out over the path, making the colors really POP.
I have never really created anything using the color orange, so I decided to listen to that voice in my head that told me to take advantage of this play of two colors and make something really different.

A couple of months ago I purchased an orange dyed sea sediment jasper cabochon for random reasons (I mostly buy things without having a plan for them, and then I'll wait and see if inspiration will come along to do something with them, which in this case worked out perfectly... ). Or course I had to use that cabochon as the focal point, the crackles in it are a bit beige/grey and the different shades of orange in it just looked divine to my eyes.

On each side of the cuff I decided to "paint" a leaf with beads. I know, on the photo they look a bit red, the beads in color I mean. The seed beads color is called "Sunset Orange" (Toho) and is very close to red, but isn't red.
After I was done with everything on the cuff (covered the whole surface with beads), I thought the leaves looked a bit "naked" like something was missing, so I took up some 3mm Swarovski sew-on stones and experiments, laying them out on the beadwork to see if they would look good there or not. And I ended up laying them out randomly over the leaves and sewed them on there.