Necklace: Grendel & Free-form Process

The inspiration for this necklace comes from the story and also from the 3D animated movie Beowulf. A lot of it is focused around the monster aspect of the story, therefore I choose to call it "Grendel".

I want to share my process with you, my lovely readers, my experiences when it comes to working with and creating a free-form bead embroidered necklace. I'm gonna also explain how I worked the free-form bead embroidered bracelet I posted some weeks ago and how I took what I learned from that and made it work for a necklace.

The first thing I did when it came to the bracelet is that I decided to use one of the cuff templates I have for when I put a metal cuff blank in-between the beading foundation and the backing. I wanted it pretty tight and neat for where I was going to add the clasp, so I added about 2.5cm (1 inch) extra of the fact that the metal cuff is a bit smaller.
I then used that template and drew it onto the foundation. Why did I do this for a free-form piece? Simple, I wanted to see how far I could work to have it somehow end up perfectly on the wrist. That is the only guideline I had, the rest is 100% free-form. I chose a focal I liked then some smaller cabochons which I liked with where the design was going.

So for the necklace!
I principal is pretty much the same. The only difference is that I cut out a 14cm in diamater circle and drew that out on my beading foundation. What's it circle for? The circle determines where the neck is gonna be on the necklace. What I did was also to measure out the center of it, so I would have some sort of idea where to go.
I placed the focals I had chosen on places where I personally thought it would look neat and glued ONE piece down, and then I began to bead. When it comes to free-form and placing focal pieces such as cabochons, I always choose to glue them down one by one, and with that i mean that after I glue down one I let it dry and then I bezel it with beads (ex. peyote). After that I move on to the next focal. See, when I was working free-form I hadn't decided where anything would be at all and therefore I chose to place my materials down slowly.

You can probably see on my "Grendel" necklace that there are two separate pieces and not one solid. After I had finished the left side of necklace I began to look at the piece and experiment with the focal pieces I had on what I wanted to do for the right side, and I ended up making them separates. Just an impulse decision!