Two Necklaces and my BOTB 14 is done!

After I completed my Battle of the Beadsmith piece I decided that I wanted to take a little breather from anything bead related, but only for a short moment, really.
I managed to get my hands on a wonderful model who was willing to pose wearing my piece, so I'm really, really happy with the end result and with the photos of course. I sent the mail to Steven (the person who is taking care of the "battle" arrangements etc.) and everything is in order. Now all of us just have to wait till we are allowed to show the photos, which happens after they're up on the FB group of BOTB. I'm really excited and curious what everyone else have created and I'm so looking forward to see all the pieces!

Enough of that! :)

I managed to complete two necklaces after I finished my battle piece and I wanted to share them with you...

A couple of weeks ago, in April, I decided to take a little short break from my battle piece and play around with some polymer clay and I ended up making a violet. Violets are one of my favorite flower. I think it has to do with the facts that my grandmother had a very small spot in her garden were she had planted some seeds a long time ago, and each summer they would pop up and bloom with a wonderful, vibrant violet color with yellow accents. I remember that I never picked them, but instead I used to lay down on the grass right next to them, smell them and just look at them.

I ended up linking the violet I made in clay so much I decided to make a rather simple necklace of it. I didn't want to take away too much focus from the flower so I used a lot of black matte seed beads with some iridescent green Swarovski crystals.

The second necklace I began to make after one day from when I completed my battle piece. The plan was to make this necklace for my mother on Mother's Day. Of course it was one week later (last Sunday of May in Sweden) than the day when I managed to complete it and send it with the post. But at least she got something, heh... Well, everyone in my family knew I was gonna be a bit absent and work on my battle piece as I told them so...
The necklace I made for my mom is a very huge difference from what I normally do. I rarely work with suck opaque colors when it comes to beads, but as the focal piece is that tiger/cat cab (which I also made with polymer clay), the colors looked so good together with the tiger.
Speaking of the tiger... or cat... Yes, I made it as well with polymer clay. I wanted to make something a bit more personal for my mother and I had asked her a couple of weeks ahead what animal she likes and her answer was tiger or lion. So I decided to try my hands more at sculpting and made the focal myself. I'm not sure how others see it, but to me, the "tiger" looks like a hybrid between a tiger and a cat. Maybe the eyes? *shrug* Always something to work on in the future, none the less :)

I'm also gonna mention that the beaded chain on both piece are inspired by Nancy Dale's "Wrap-bracelet"  technique, which appears in one of the early numbers of "Digital Beading Magazine Australia".