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Klimt necklace
The idea for this necklace began with a string of flat, rectangular transparent yellow beads with opaque flower murrini embedded in the glass. If Gustav Klimt had made beads, they would have looked like this...so I started designing a necklace around them, alternating the flat beads with blocks of seed bead work.
Then serendipity took a hand. All the necklace designs insisted that they wanted a Klimt-style face at the top. I was gloomily considering the chances of doing a polymer clay transfer bead with gold foil behind the face, feeling quite sure that it wouldn't look as bright and saturated as the rest of the necklace...when a bead show came to town and I walked into a booth selling glorious porcelain and lacquered beads inspired by the art of...guess who?
The focal bead, then, is not my work; it's the work of a lacquer artisan, sort-of-but-not-exactly copying the face of Judith from Klimt's "Judith with the Head of Holofernes."
You can see some of the yellow Chiclet beads beside and under the head, and in the lower right corner of the detail picture there's a gold-colored coin pearl and the beginning of the circles of beadwork which I used to create big sweeping curves in contrast to the grid format of the Chiclets.
A couple more technical notes: the branching black beads at the top of the necklace are worked in feather stitch over a base of gold beads. I continued the branching black-on-gold motif up into the strap, which is worked in brick stitch.
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