Green Acres

Well, I have finished my submission for "Art Meets Ag". It's not exactly the necklace I had planned but that is typical for most of my beadwork projects; I start with a basic idea and it morphs and changes as needed.

What's a bit odd about this necklace is that I had the idea for it last year sometime. I had found a little toy tractor at a tag sale and thought it might be cool to incorporate it into a farm-themed piece. The original idea was to submit it for the Iowa State Fair but it ended up on the back burner and never got past the planning stages.

Here are the steps, from start to finish, of how I planned the project. Not being a very good sketcher, I made a mock-up by cutting and pasting various clip art from a publishing program. Here's the original concept:

I had no idea how to do the barbed wire fencing and have only just recently found out that Fire Mountain has some leather cording which resembles barbed wire. A little too late but it's good to know for future projects!

After finding out about this show, the first thing I thought of was my farm necklace!! For starters, I knew I had to figure out if the toy tractor would work before doing anything. Long story short: it didn't. And I have a sad little dismembered tractor to show for it...

Please, no one email me and tell me it was a rare, vintage collectible worth $1000 dollars - as you can tell, the point would be moot.

After figuring out that the toy tractor would not work I decided I should bead one. So I did...

... along with leaves, sunflowers and several ears of corn.

Now, as you might have noticed from the original mock-up, it was planned to have 13 ears of corn. Since each ear takes roughly 2 1/2 hours each to make, I knew right away that that simply was not going to happen in reality. In reality, I made 7 and that took me a looooonnnnggg time (but they are kind of cute, if I do say so myself!).


Here was the proposed lay-out as of 2 days ago. Not the best photo, I know, but it was late and I was tired:

Finally, last night, I decided that, while most of my necklaces tend toward the "more is more" side of things, this one needed to be a "less is more" piece. I wanted it to wear like a piece of fine jewelry but with kitch-y charm. The barbed wire gave way to a gold rope chain. The ears of corn were cut down from 7 to 5 (I now have a cute pair of earrings!! tee, hee...)

So here is the final piece -

"Green Acres"

- finished, photo-ed and entered! 

I hope it gets juried in - wish me luck! :)