kerravonsen | Seasons (Done for SSHG 2012)

This is the second gift I made for the 2012

sshg_exchange. This was made as a gift-to-the-community, off my own bat, because the idea for this necklace took hold of me ever since I'd seen "The potions ingredients garden" as a prompt in the sign-ups. When I didn't get that person as a recipient, I still wanted to pursue the idea, so when I'd finished my assigned gift, I started on this one.

And a Certain Person was given the necklace for Christmas. 8-)

Recipient: community
Title: Seasons (http://sshg-exchange.livejournal.com/332204.html)
Author: kerravonsen
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Summary: Seasons turn in the potions ingredients garden.
Original Prompt: This is a combination of a few different prompts, from different people. (a) The potions ingredients garden; (b) Hermione and Snape, the marriage of Summer and Winter.

Author's Notes:

Thanks to

dawnmist for feedback.

The idea of the potions ingredients garden really appealed to me, and I wanted to do something for it. Melding with this idea was the idea of Winter and Summer; Snape and Hermione. So this necklace is an unending circle, representing the turn of the seasons, with leaves and flowers and fruit of different colours, one blending into the next: white for winter snow, black for winter cold, purple/blue/teal for the thaw, green for spring, yellow for summer, red for autumn, brown for the turn to winter again. It was also fun to imagine that the strange coloured leaves, flowers and berries were exotic Wizarding plants that don't follow the mundane rules of plant colouring; that there could be green flowers, purple leaves, glittering brown berries, and fronds that shimmered white in moonlight.

Design Notes

(These are the notes I made to myself when trying to decide what to do.)

The images will be sent as a "gift to the community"; the actual necklace will probably be a Christmas present for ########.

The potions ingredients garden, crossed with the day=Hermione, night=Severus or summer=Hermione, winter=Severus idea.

Base chain, brown cotton (N chains)
3SC per ch, green cotton (N x 3)
1SC per SC, very fine green cotton; this has the beads etc strung on it. (N x 3)
Leaf beads on twisted copper wire; varying lengths.
Flower beads with leaf beads on twisted copper wire.
Medium-sized beads (in clusters? with/without leaf beads) as berries on twisted copper wire.
Seed-beads in the spaces between wired beads.
- Pattern: B B B B B W (6)
- We need W wired beads and W * 5 seed beads
- For each W there are six spiral stitches.
- Thus for each W there are two base stitches.
- Therefore W * 2 = N
- Therefore if W = 90, then N = 180.
No fastening, just one very long loop, to signify the eternal looping of night into day into night again; which means the pattern above keeps repeating without a break.
Possibly attach the wired beads to the thick green cotton rather than the thin green cotton, for more security. That way I can also see what the necklace would look like without any seed beads. On the other hand, would that make attaching the seed beads more difficult?
Colouring: the seed-beads and the leaf-beads and the flowers have a gradual gradation of colour.
- Black
- Purple
- Blue-green, purple/aqua
- Green
- Amber/Yellow
- Green/Orange (bicolour leaves)
- Orange
- Red
- Brown
- (Silver/Gunmetal)
- Black

The references to "chains" and "stitches" are talking about crochet stitches. I made one or two test-pieces to help figure out (a) how best to attach the leaf/flower/berry beads and (b) what pattern I should use for seed beads versus wired-clusters. My first attempt at figuring out a pattern was too hard to keep track of, because I was alternating the number of seed beads used between clusters, so in the end I made it simpler and with more space between clusters, in something that was a multiple of three, since there would be N * 3 stitches in the crochet spiral.

I didn't decide until late, whether I was going to go for day-and-night or winter-and-summer; I kept on switching between them. I decided to go for winter-and-summer because the four seasons made it easier to figure out what colours to use besides black, white, grey, gold and red, and what order they should go in.

As you can see, I used a variety of wire colours, rather than just copper wire.

(edited to point to different offsite album)