Patience & Determination: The Gemstone Garland Choker

by Lady Mockingbird.
(Upstate New York)

My housemate, thankfully, has the perfect neck for choker style necklaces. I’m lucky indeed that she is willing to model my work from time to time.

I’ve been working on this gemstone garland choker off-and-on for nearly five full months now. This piece and the two other cluster pieces I finally completed during the fourth week of June were a long time coming into existence.

When I first decided I wanted to create a gemstone garland choker, I knew I wanted good quality faceted gemstone roundels. I had some of what I wanted to use on hand already, but not all of it. So I had to scour my usual gemstone suppliers stock and keep checking back with them, until just the right strands were in my possession.

The bracelet that was born because I already had all of the headpins done and the shaded carnelian roundels ready for the necklace.

From those strands, I hand picked the rainbow moonstones, amethysts, blue iolite and grossular garnets I used to create this singular and luscious garland choker. There are 312 faceted gemstone rondels in this necklace. Each gem is suspended from its own hand crafted sterling silver head pin, with a secure wrapped loop connection to a lovely 3mm sterling silver cable style chain.

It takes a while to hand measure, cut and then take a torch to more than 300 individual 28g sterling silver head pins. It takes even longer to file off any odd ball points or bumps from such tiny head pins. And longer still to put a gemstone on each head pin before forming each wrapped loop. The loops have to be wrapped after the gem is hung from the chain.

This view shows the depth of color on the colored stones and the fabulous clarity of the rainbow moonstones. I do wish I could have captured more of the fantastic flash on the moonstones though.

I actually had originally planned for the garland necklace to have 100 or so shaded carnelian gemstones on it too, but once I got the first four colors in place, I discovered I liked that combination without the bright orange of the carnelian, so I switched the plan and doubled up on the moonstone and the garnet. This left me with a bunch of carnelian stones along with a fair number of extra grossular garnets. So, I decided to use those to make a garland style bracelet as well.

The last few remaining orphans I kept from going to waste by pulling out a sweet oblong faceted focal carnelian and making a cluster drop pendant.

A few gemstone bead orphans left from the necklace and bracelet worked very well as a topper cluster for this sweet carnelian drop.

I cannot tell you how many times I was ready to scrap the entire project. I definitely had to put them aside and let my mind and hands focus on less tiny work. But now that it is finished I am so glad I let patience and determination win the day.

Lady Mockingbird
Mockingbird Lane Wire at Etsy