Bussan Beauty

Last month, I finally had a chance to go on a weekend trip and get out of Seoul for a short time. A couple other teachers organized a trip to the lovely costal city of Bussan. I spent the entire weekend laying on the beach, frolicking on the edge of the frigid water, hiking around the rocks and beachcombing. The results of this beachcombing was a variety of little pieces of sea glass and a couple handfulls of fascinating little shells. I loaded up my little treasures into my pockets, and brought them home. (If you want to see more pictures of my vacation to Bussan, check out my other blog http://www.daleskoreanadventures.blogspot.com/.

To this point, one month later, i have created one piece with any of these things. The first piece I tried was drilling a hole in a shell with my drill, but that ended disasterously when the beautiful shell just cracked in half and broke. Does anyone know how to make holes in shells? Any technique to this, or special tool i need?

My second piece went far better. It already had a perfectly placed natural hole at the top of the shell. It was rather small, but it was an easy thing to simply sand the hole bigger. Once the hole is started i am fine, but i am unsure how to create new holes without destroying the shell. Again, any help would be great on this one.

I kept the design of this piece rather simple. I started with beaded chain, which matched the hues of the shell nicely. It was easy enough to simply create my own jump ring to attach it to the chain. After that came the harder part. I fanangled another piece of chain to loop back and forth a couple times underneath the shell, but still look smooth from the front part. In the end, i got that too. (The problem there was that the chain was too thin to fit jump rings of any wire i have through the hole... it's quite fine). After tying them all together with wire in the back, it worked out okay. I had two nice dangling bits of chain, and one middle loop holding a jump ringed blue flatback bead.

I do so love using natural elements in my pieces. I am trying to work on doing this more often, but the sparkles of pretty pretty beads are often very distracting haha. What a happy conundrum.