Welcome to 2025! After a holiday blogging break that I didn't plan for but should have anticipated, I'm back today with some beady goodness and an outfit from a work day between Christmas and New Years. (I did take a couple days off work before Christmas but had my nose back to the grindstone on December 26 for a project with a hard deadline. I'm taking over this yearly project so unfortunately my Decembers will be work-intense from now on.)
First off, we did have a white Christmas in St Paul, though the snow wasn't very deep and we didn't get any fresh snowfall on Christmas Day. But it warmed up on Boxing Day and most of it melted. The morning of Dec 27 was eerily foggy over the Mississippi River; I could barely see the trees along the bluff on the other side of the High Bridge.
With the weather report out of the way, on to the birthday beads!
For the last several years, my mother-in-law has agreed to make donations to a rabbit rescue society in lieu of gifts for me and my husband for most holidays, but this year she surprised me with a box of beads in the mail! She had purchased beads for an ornament-making project that didn't work out, and she sent them to me, thinking I could find a use for them. (Of course she was correct about that!) So I had a lovely last-minute addition to the already amazing 2024 birthday gift bonanza.
This was exciting not only because they were beads, but they were second-hand beads ready to be given new life. The fact that bead projects can easily be taken apart and the beads re-used is one thing I love about this hobby compared to other crafts I've done that use up the supplies, like painting, needlework, sewing, etc. The other day I was telling my husband about a YouTube jewelry maker who says she makes 30-40 pieces per week, and I wondered how she can possibly store all that jewelry (since she doesn't sell any and she says she keeps most of what she makes). My husband joked that she only has 100 beads; she just makes them into new pieces of jewelry every day. :D Well, I definitely have just a bit over 100 beads in my collection, and now I have more. Let's check them out!
Red wood beads: I love wood beads for earrings because they're lightweight, and I think they are really nice as spacers on a paper bead necklace. I didn't have any red ones.
Czech glass donut beads (that are not blurry in real life, haha): I especially like this shape for stacking between round beads on stack earrings. In this color, they really do look like doughnuts, don't they? Plain glazed and chocolate glazed.
Glass pearl beads in light blue and teal: I didn't have glass pearls in these colors so they are a great addition to my stash. (I use glass pearls in everything.)
White glass pearls in 3 sizes (4mm, 6mm, 8mm): I immediately added about a third of these beads to the white bead mix I use in making memory wire bracelets because the soft glow of a white pearl is gorgeous mixed in with basically any other bead. White glass pearls are my #1 can do, will do anything bead and I've never felt like I had enough of them.
White glass pearl bead strand with crystal spacers and fancy metal beads: isn't this one a stunner?
The mother lode of white glass pearls: remember that I said I felt like I never had enough of them? I do not feel that way anymore! It is hard to express how big this container of beads is. Oh wait, there is a way to express it: the beads fill a volume around 6" x 5" x 1.5" (15cm x 13cm x 4cm). That is a lot of beads. (As a bonus in this photo you can see my rabbit-themed kitchen nightlight that was a gift from my mom last year.)
Last but not least is this container of rondelle spacer beads with colorful rhinestones: I only have a small stash of clear rhinestone rondelles that I have been husbanding so it was exciting to get this large selection to play with.
I am a fan of whimsical jewelry that mixes white pearls and colorful beads (like a candy pearl jewelry aesthetic). But given my historical scarcity of pearls (real or faux) in my collection, I haven't done much at all in that style. But with the influx of the big bucket of white glass pearls and colorful rhinestone beads, my first project using my birthday beads designed itself immediately.
I quickly discovered that 10mm pearls sat perfectly with the rhinestone spacers, so I made a necklace alternating the pearls with the rhinestone beads in a rainbow color order: red, pink, yellow, green, aqua blue, cobalt blue, black. I repeated this pattern until I hit about 23" of length, crimped off the tiger tail beading wire inside clamshell covers, added a lobster clasp, and voila: a snazzy whimsical pearl and rainbow rhinestone necklace!
Happily for me, the modified rainbow of colors in my new necklace was a great match to the colors in my circus tent striped skirt...which it just so happened I'd already planned to wear for work a couple days later. In fact, this whole outfit was already staged for me to wear so all I had to do was add the necklace to it. Rather than replacing my rainbow striped scarf with the necklace, I just wore them both together. If you can't dress extra in the Christmas/New Years interval, when can you? (I am happy to dress extra pretty much any week of the year, of course, but it feels most on point during the holidays.)
I had put together this outfit with the idea that it had the Christmas-y red and green color combo with the New Years Eve stand-by black plus a full rainbow of colors for a major color pop. A black + bright color outfit has festive holiday vibes and is the perfect counterpoint to the gloomy grey or blindingly snow-bright days of winter.
The black sweater was a great backdrop to the bright and sparkly pearl necklace, and I liked how the striped scarf framed the necklace when I wore it long and knotted (method #3 here).
My all-DIY bracelet stack really leaned into the Christmas red and green color scheme. I started with a pair of paper bead bracelets I had made to coordinate with the starter piece for last winter's 7 color capsule wardrobe. (I shared the page to bead details in this post.) I supplemented the paper bead bracelets with various glass bead bracelets in red, green, and black. {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}
My earrings are another bead soup creation, designed to wear with the paper bead bracelet set. I just pulled out pairs of small beads in the colors blue, green, red, beige, black, and silver and stacked them. Though I readily stack 6 beads on a stick to make earrings, this time I changed things up ever so slightly by stacking 3 beads on one stick and 3 beads on another, then connecting the sticks to make the earrings a bit more dangly. I included a little silver flower bead to the stack to coordinate with the silver rose charm on the bracelet.
Do you like to wear bright rainbow colors in the winter? Would you wear a necklace and scarf together? Do you like pearl jewelry? Did you have a white Christmas this year?
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