Mila's Fashion: Gemstones and Hearts!

Valentine's Day is creeping up on us, and I'm still listing jewelry pieces with hearts. I have gemstone hearts I should use, but I've lately been involved with the lampwork hearts that you see here. My favorite necklace with a heart is probably the one (close-up is above) I made with lampwork beads from Lynn Nurge, genuine rubies, and goldfilled beads and charms. The rubies are a generous size, nice and chunky, and the goldfilled components match the flecks of gold in these dichroic beads. Instead of graduating rubies until they were smaller and smaller, or keeping them all large (and thus making a very expensive necklace), I decided to make the ruby part of the necklace like a "collar" and join it to large-linked goldfilled chain.This ruby necklace will be a great Valentine's Day present for someone.

I bought several of these silvery pink Venetian hearts because I was so taken by the colour, the light pink laced with such a clear silvery shimmer. I liked the heart so much that I decided to keep it the star by hanging it from pink suede and adding only a touch of silver and a little faceted amethyst rondelle to the bottom. This lampwork pendant necklace can be found on the same page as the lampwork pendant necklace seen below, another heart pendant, this time from Annie Divelbiss. It, too, is laced with silver; the colours are different tones of blue-purple, and it hangs from a pretty imprinted sterling silver chain from the Karen Hill Tribes of Thailand. I've left most of the chain so that the buyer can wear it about 27 inches or have it shortened to wear as a choker.

Today we had the first snow of the year - or I should say the season, since we had no snow either in December or November. It was a wet, sleety snow, just enough to make driving difficult for drivers who aren't used to driving on slick roads and give shivers to the rest of us. How wonderful it would be to have about 6 inches of soft, powdery snow to look beautiful for a day or so, then melt away. How can it be winter without any snow?