Craft Friday: Yo-yo necklace

Craft Friday is a 2012 recurring blog post

 where I present either a hobby jewelry technique

or project I'm currently working on.

The finished yo-yo necklace.
Totally my own design, since I didn't
like any of the ideas I found online.

This one wasn't actually that hard to do, in the end, but it went through at least 3 change-in-design phases. It was more trial and error than anything else, but once I finally figured out how I could make it fall neatly around my neck and not have any itching parts, it was easy.

My reason for making this mixed media necklace:

First, if you google "yo-yo necklace", or search on Etsy, you'll mainly see the design that have the "flat" variant with the hole on the front. I -really- don't like that variant. Not at all. They look look like barnacles, and I don't want that.

Secondly, I wanted the yo-yos in the finished piece to be more like beads, which meant that they had to be very small. And fat. So they're not HUGE and look like something you'd want to use to hide you decolletage.

And thirdly, I didn't want to have them sewn together. Nope. Beads aren't sewn together: you string them and/or use findings in between. Basically, that meant I had to pierce them twice with eyelet pins and connect those to one another using small rings. I guess you could string them (using double strings; one up and one down through the beads), but I wanted to use metallic findings too.

So basically, I started with planning how many of the 3 different sizes of yo-yo(-beads) I would need, and then I had to come up with a good way to connect them and add a clasp. I do think it turned out really well. The lock is connected to the beads with 2 mm (diameter) satin cord, and the yo-yo's themselves have one seed bead on top of them.

-

Oh, incidentally, since I suddenly realized how weird it was not to I stumbled across any pages with different yo-yo necklace designs in google than those barnacle ones, I spent some time trying to search for just that.

I lucked out - just as I started to hope that oh my goddess my design is unique on the web - because I found the pages with Carmi's stuffed yo-yos, Victoria's post about something similar and these whimsy acorns by Catherine.
Even more funny, I remember searching via google for this and I found a young woman who had actually managed to get a whole pattern published with the -near- exact same design like mine! And now, damn it, I can't find it online! It was written in English, and the journal was either about sewing or beading, and it was published in 2010 and the pattern cost 11,95 money (can't remember if it was dollars or euros...). Some of it were drawn by hand.

And now I'm so frustrated that I can't link back to her design, even though I didn't use any of it. But she had way more examples that were for bracelets, using these exact same yo-yo's, and I would have wanted to look at them again myself and also show you.

If anyone finds the pattern, can you post about it here? Please?


later edit on 2013-09-17

I found it! Took a LOT of searching via google, but I did find it. The pattern can be bought at least at two different web pages, on McCall's sewing patterns page (where it costs 9,99 dollars) and on Indygo junction (also for 9,99 dollars). The name of the designer seems to be Amy Barickman.