Shortly after I moved to the Mendocino Coast I started making these bead form pendants. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where the beginning ideas came from but I do remember that my wife Carlie was making some soldered beadlike pendant forms that I liked, that was probably part of the original inspiration. We pass ideas and thoughts back and forth between our jewelry benches, we have been working side by side for about 40 years or so. Somehow I started making these discs and domes out of sheet metal and texturing, notching and doming them. After all of the parts are made and polished, textured and colored, I put a piece of annealed 3/16 inch tubing through the holes each has at it's center and then hammer and flare the ends until the entire assembly is frozen in place. The first beads
I made were much simpler than these, just two domes on the sides and a disc in the center, but I became fascinated with them and the process. When I first started I became somewhat obsessed and for 6 weeks or so didn't make any other jewelry forms. I carried a chain around with me that had 6 to 8 beads on it and would stop and show it to anyone who look. I worried at first that I would run out of ideas but have found that not to be true. I'm still making some 20 years later (although not as many) and new ways of doing them still occur. I have also incorporated them
into bracelets, rings, pendants, pins and earrings.
I've made hundreds of them now and have some collectors that have as many as a dozen of them. When I was teaching at the Mendocino Art Center I taught mixed metal bead making classes several times and always really enjoyed watching someone get really excited when they made their first bead. One of the things I liked about teaching was what I learned from watching others use their own unique thoughts and design skills to make jewels. I often learned really useful things from absolute beginners who didn't have preconceived notions of how things could or should be done and would try anything.
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