Recycled champagne bottle and silver seed pod

I am planning on spending half a day tomorrow making some recycled glass beads out of the champagne bottles that were purchased for mum and dad's 60th wedding anniversary back in March by Uncle Arthur. I have been meaning to do this for absolutely ages but with it being such a busy time for my business, I haven't had chance. As I didn't go to the craft market on Saturday due to illness (I am completely recovered now, thanks for all your good wishes) and I have restocked my stall last week, I have some time to play around with new stuff til Saturday.

My Uncle Arthur had a stroke recently and is recovering, we don't think he's likely to be able to live completely independently again. His motor functions aren't great, he does get a little confused which is understandable but fortunately, he's still all there and knows who everyone is. I know he'd love to see the beads made up into some jewellery. I want to make jewellery for myself, my sister, Sandy, my mum, Auntie Mary who was so instumental in planning the party and something for Uncle Arthur to give to his grand daughter. For my other sister, Sharon, she makes her own jewellery and so I will give her a few beads so she can make something for herself. Hmmmm, thinking about it, I may need to spend more than half a day making the beads - from that little list, I'm going to need quite a few! I go a little insane if I spend more than three hours on melting recycled glass into beads - it gets a teeny bit tedious! I'll spread it out over 2-3 days I think.

The colour of glass isn't that great (broken shards of the bottles are shown on the right of the photograph above) but I think the new beads on the left that I made at the back end of last week will provide a nice colourful counterpoint. I'm calling the new irregularly shaped beads Plasma Doughnut Nuggets, these ones are made with a brown and gingery frit blend. For the Diamond Anniversary jewellery, I have some smokey quartz, rutilated quartz and opal gemstone chips and I think any of those will also combine well. See how it goes when I have everything on the table in front of me.

For all the people interested in the PMC seed pod bead that I made, here it is all polished up and combined with black waxed cotton macrame.