Owls and trees and a bit of seed beading - my creative space

I'm still finding inspiration from Beadfreaky's lovely little ceramic pendants.

I bought a few of them!

Here I combined an owl pendant with some nighttime themed components.
Some gorgeous rainbow moonstone beads, silver beads that look like birds nests. Contrast comes from the blue agate beads and labrodite beads and chips. I found some glass star beads to continue the theme and add some depth.

Here I used a tree pendant for a woodland theme - brass bird components plus some beads in the same tone family. A wonderful mookite beads, some rutilated rhodonite (the slightly pinky flat ones), a couple of green ceramic bead tubes, accented with the bright green howlite composite beads and a few unakite beads (the pink and green ones).
I used a small portion of chain at the back for lightness.

I'm pretty pleased with the way these turned out - but time will tell if anyone else is!

I also wanted to do a small project that I could do while the tennis is on (yes, it's Wimbledon time again).
I had an idea for some circle earrings - I guess it was making the large loopy ones awhile ago that kept the idea in my head. You can see them here.

I thought I'd have to use different size beads for this, but I really don't like the really little size 15 ones - and I don't have a great variety of this size anyway. But realised that I'd have to use them and some size 11's plus maybe size 8's in order to get the circle thing going.
Now I realise that I'm not inventing the wheel here and that there is probably a tutorial somewhere about how to make circles - so off to the interwebs I went - and I didn't have to look far.

If you haven't already found it, Interweave Press's Beading Daily site is a wonderful resource - there are many free downloadable projects as well as tips, technique tutes and all sorts of other grand stuff.

I happened to spot a beaded toggle clasp by Melinda Barta in the free peyote stitch projects ibook - that would tell me how to do it!

Sure enough it told me what I needed to know - bead sizes, number of stitches, number of rows - easy! So I could also concentrate on the tennis (Our Sam won and then our Bernie : D )

This is as far as I got last night and I think they might need to be a bit bigger, but I'll see what they look like when I finish.

How has your creative week been?

Do you have any favorite in-front-of-tv projects?

Joining in with My Creative Space at Village Voices on Kidspot - hop on over and have a look.