So, today’s creation is one of my favorites, but it didn’t start out that way. In fact, during most of the process today, I was writing the blog post to go with it in my head. It was going to be titled, “You Win Some, You Lose Some” or something equally cliche but denoting failure. I was going to talk about how great failure is and how much you learn from it.

And I did fail today. And I did learn a lot. But what resulted was pretty good, so it’s not a total fail.

I started out my creative time with my new solitude ritual. I sat quietly with my journal, thinking I was going to use one of the yellow necklaces from yesterday’s post to make a chunky statement necklace (like the royal blue one). The first thought that came to my head, and that I scrawled in my journal, was, “I don’t want 31 Days to be a One Trick Pony,” where I basically make the same necklace from different vintage pieces each day. Don’t get me wrong, those chunky pieces are some of my favorite things to make, but no one wants to see that every day for a month. Not even me. I want to use these 31 Days to grow myself and to stretch my creativity as I develop my creative habit.

I decided to try my hand at making my own bangle, using the beads like charms. I measured the diameter of the bangle I used for my Charmed Mother bracelet and used my fancy math skills to figure out how long the wire would need to be to for the circumference. (Circumference = pi x diameter, yo! I didn’t even have to Google it. Now at this very moment, Husband is studying for a BIG EXAM using Calculus and all sorts of other things I haven’t thought about since high school, but I’m still feeling pretty good about remembering this simple geometry formula.)

I was excited about this bracelet – I haven’t made many, and it looked really pretty as I was working on it.

But then I tried it on, and it didn’t look that great. It was better in my head than in reality.

I cut it apart to squeeze other beads on, hoping that would solve my problem. I didn’t like the way that one looked either. I loved the way the beads looked flat on the table but not on my wrist.

So I removed some beads and turned it into a pendant of sorts.

I added silver chain and a clasp.

And I love it! I want to make one in every color. But I’ll spare you a post on each one. I’ll do my best to make something new and interesting each day for the rest of October. (I’m 2/3 of the way through!)

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This post is part of a 31 day series. Find all the posts in this series here.

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