You never know where your blog will take you…being a part of this wonderful jewelry blogging world has not led me to some far away places!   A part of me was fortunate enough to travel to England recently.  Well, a little something handmade did all the traveling.

My travels all started back with Lori’s first Bead Soup Blog party… as you may know she just finished up her 2nd successful party filled with gorgeous collaborative jewelry featured on dozens of blogs.  Somehow or other I was super lucky that Joanne of Daisychain Jewellery featured my Bead Soup piece along with others in a photo collage on her blog (you’ll have to visit her blog – she offers a wealth of information!).   Joanne is a frequent contributor to Beads & Beyond, and one of the magazine’s wonderful editors contacted me after seeing my piece,  asking if I was interesting in doing an article for their publication.  You can imagine how excited I was at this opportunity….but the pressure to come up with something “good enough” then hit me.   It didn’t take long to find some inspiration though…and I found it with LeAnn’s sweet porcelain bird charm.  I knew I wanted to stamp a little inspiration on metal  to go along with it… I then added a carved flower from a set that I had been holding on to since forever, and one of Erin’s classic leaf charms.  Then I just went right on working with wire – the fun part!!  This wire work special issue is full of great projects – I hope you can find a copy to flip through in a store near you.

This is the original "Fly Free" piece that I proposed for my article....a starting point.

I pared down this version by taking out the riveting, but still kept a subtle element of mixed metals.

Another version...this one flew free, to the home of a friend!

Thank you for visiting today, and for listening to a small tale of my jewelry travels.