Jewelry Making

I promised to show off some of the items we picked up at the IGJS we attended this month. One of the types of jewelry making components that we saw quite a bit of are precious stones, beads and mother of pearl shell that had large holes in them. I had to do a bit of searching, but I think a common name for these interesting pieces are “jewelry donuts”.

Now, we aren’t huge fans of following trends so we have no idea whether this has already come and gone. Interestingly, I did see them featured in the latest Fire Mountain catalog. I know I’ve seen this type of bead many times before made of various types of gemstone, glass and even wood. But at the show it just seemed like it was EVERYWHERE. What was mostly interesting is that in addition to the usual “round” jewelry donut, they also had different shapes like squares, rectangles and even triangles and trapezoids.

The picture above are some examples of square mother of pearl “donuts” that are dyed a dark brown in color. We just liked the vintage “craftsman” type of look to these MOPs. We were actually able to make use of them in earrings, necklaces and even bracelets. For me, the latest “donuts” we saw at the show were neat because often times the “hole” was extra large leaving only this thin rim of shell.

The MOPs are actually drilled through on two opposite sides. So if you do end up using this type of MOP donut, you’ll probably want to use headpins on each side of the MOP with the thin end pointing outward so that you don’t see anything in the “hole” (unless that’s your intention of course!). Then you can use a simple loop or wirewrap loop to connect the MOPs together.