Jazz Trio - Rings & Things Product Review

I'm a little behind on my Rings & Things product reviews. The good folks at R & T send their blog partners things to review or experiment with each month. Products provided by Rings & Things include the 8mm Swarovski crystal cubes in topaz and montana blue, the 22 gauge copper wire, the round copper blanks and one lonesome brown lava bead left over from a previous review

I also wanted to work on a piece that used the color scheme of the Art Bead Scene challenge. If you've seen this month's painting, it's a crazy folk art piece featuring a piano playing cow. So to say I stretched the connection between the inspiration and my piece may be an understatement. I loosely used the color scheme of blue, orange and green. .

So here is what I did:

I took the copper blanks and textured them with a screwdriver for the dot pattern and the other blank I used my ball peen hammer. I used my handy metal hole punch and added two holes to make those disks into connectors and then I pulled out my wooden dapping block and domed them into a concave shape. I used an eye pin to hold the beads in the center of those connectors. Next I wire-wrapped the cubes and black wooden beads to the copper chain. The rest of the components are connected with copper eyepins and jumprings. So there we have a nice little necklace that reminds me of improvisational jazz with elements speaking and playing off one another.

Tools provided by Rings & Things: wooden dapping block, ball peen hammer and metal hole-punch.

And really with those 3 tools and a bench block you can make so many different things with wire and metal, I would consider them as essential as your set of pliers.