Stepping outside my comfort zone

Recently on UK Beaders forum, we were raising some money by taking some of Lynn Davy's stash of fuglies off her hands. Fugly is the term lampworkers use for beads which are... well, let's just say they are 'very' ugly - in their eyes - some of them look pretty good to me!
The one Lynn sent me was WAY outside my comfort zone - with a mix of several bright colours. I was stumped... until I hit on the idea of sending off to my mate, Julie, of Lushlampwork, asking her if she'd etch it for me. This subdued the colours slightly and brought it a bit nearer to my comfort zone.
The bead is so colourful and has swirls and dots that it needed to be strung with something to compliment the colours, but simple as that the eye is not distracted from the focal bead. I chose a selection of seed and 4mm beads which reflected the colour in the bead and strung three strands with some Tibetan silver to break it up:

I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and I'm sure it did me good to be stretched like this!

Wish I could have been stretched at WW this morning... put on an awful three pounds... Whoops! Ah well, I had a marvellous time putting it on - and now I have to be very very good to try and get it off again. C'est la vie!

We were given our new project at Silversmithing last night and we have to make an item (not necessarily jewellery) using mixed metals. I'm still mulling, not decided what my item might be - or what metals I might mix! Watch this space...

I've got something very exciting happening next weekend (not jewellery related) which I'll tell you about later in the week... but it involves lots of cleaning and tidying (which I hate) so there may not be too much jewellery to show in the next few days.