Custom jewelry for myself

My husband is CTO of Heyzap, a startup company that makes it easy for online-game developers to publish their games on the internet and make money from them. Last night Heyzap had a massive office party to celebrate securing another round of funding, which I, of course, attended.

Whilst these tech parties are usually full of men, I do often meet a surprising number of girls (almost all girlfriends/wives of tech guys) who are interested in my jewelry. So I like to make sure I am always wearing at least one piece of my own work and that the pieces I wear represent the best of my style. 

I bought this dress for the party (it looked better on!) and didn't feel that any of my existing jewelry was quite perfect enough to go with it. I had plenty of time the morning before the party so I wanted to make some eye-catching jewelry that would go beautifully with the dress.

I settled on a combination of black and pearl (never one to mix colours too much!) as a scheme that I could easily use to create something modern yet classy. I do have some lovely black faceted beads in many different sizes but I had recently bought some black annealed iron wire from my local hardware store (for a different project) and was itching to try it out so in the end that won out as the black component.

After a few false starts and lots of time browsing the internet for inspiration I finally found my inspiration in the dress itself. I decided to pick out the geometric squares design and my 2 different sizes of wire were perfect to represent the thick and thin sections.

The result were these earrings. I used 18 gauge wire to form the basic shapes then hammered them flat and added 24 gauge for the accents. The dangle at the bottom is a 3-sided rectangle with a wire-wrapped pearl on one end.

Sadly I lost the dangle from one of the earrings over the course of the evening so, in hindsight, I should have added some of the thin wire to the bottom section as well, to prevent it from slipping off.

However I do think that they still look good without that part so will probably not bother to make a replacement.

What do you think?