The big hug - part 2

If you don't know part 1 of the big hug yet, you can find it here.

We left off at the cliffhanger of my dropping my boro lampwork shark on the kitchen floor. The nose and tail broke off, but I could only find part of the tail.
Then something unexpected happened that I can honestly not explain. At least a week later, I found the other piece of the tail, but have no idea where it suddenly came from because I had searched the whole kitchen floor. My best bet is that it had flown even further and the cats found it and knocked it back into the kitchen.
Anyhow, I suddenly had a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe, I would be able to do something with it. Not what I had planned, not what I really wanted which would make me 100% happy, but something that was still good.

Now how to achieve that?
Obviously I had to glue the shark first. My complicated relationship with glue has long been a running joke among my friends. Much longer than my jewelry-making journey. It's a miracle I don't still have things glued to my fingers from years ago (that's actually a thing for me). I'm terrible with glue and my experience told me that the shark would not be perfect.
Surprise! Not. Of course it wasn't perfect.
So I would have to find a way to hide the scars the best I could. Distracting from them with gold as I had done for my friend's broken dolphin wasn't an option for me because the octopus is copper. Leaving the tail off completely and disguising it - unlike that of my shark the dolphin's tail never turned up again - wasn't an option either because I had the tail and love that long fin.

The tough part about hiding the scars would be that the one through the nose is very close to the eye and that there's a quite massive glass loop on the tail (it is a pendant after all). Had the shark been like a cab, all the way flat on the back, I might have been able to glue it completely onto some backing.
Even before starting I knew I wouldn't be all that happy with the nose part. Oh well.

What exactly should I do, though?
It was obvious that bead embroidery was the only way to go. As I said, this shark is much smaller than the other ones and was even more fragile now (haha). Just wrapping the octopus to it wouldn't make for a very sturdy construction.

So instead I would glue the shark onto the backing where possible, then sew the loop to it and hide it under beads. I would also glue the octopus's head as well as possible (there are wires from the wrapping in the back which lift it up a bit) just to make it hold safely enough while arranging the tentacles around the shark.

Please excuse this bad picture. It's one of my infamous
night time WIP pics and is usually just intended
 for friends. Actually, I had to retrieve it from an old
Facebook message. I hardly ever take real WIP pictures.

This, my friends, sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I first sewed the tentacles on in a few spots. Copper is pliable and can still very stubbornly refuse to do what you want, especially in thick wire wrapped like this, even more so if you go wild with tentacle loops. I would have loved to preserve more of the flow from the WIP pic, but that would have been very wide for a focal for myself.
Of course I would have to sew down the tentacles some more after deciding on bead placement.

So I did all of that and then I had a lot of space for beads. I didn't want to buy new beads at the time. I had a load of seed and cube beads in different sizes and a variety of blue, clear, green, purple, and who has been following my jewelry making for a while knows I can't resist pearls in water scenes.
I started in what I consider (my) classic bead embroidery meaning going in bead rows lying next to each other. Very organized looking, I thought it would make a nice calm background for the hug.
One corner in, I had to admit to myself that I hated it. Because of the thick wire, those tentacles aren't laying flat. So there are not only beads around them, but also quite a few over and  under them. There are also beads under the shark and over the scars (I'm indeed not all that happy with the nose part, but couldn't manage any better without concealing the eye) and under the octopus's head - and getting in these spaces in nice organized rows? Yeah, it didn't work.
I can't tell you how long it took me to embroider that background, one or two beads at a time.

A slightly better WIP picture, still meant for
friends. It doesn't do the sparkle in the
goldstone or the shark justice.

Next up - my old enemy, finishing jewelry.
Two months and still no chain.
Then, however, I remembered my mermaid (this is one big piece of jewelry, but luckily went to a customer who loves it big).

I still had some copper crimps and the faux leather ribbon whose colors worked well with the background.
When I tried it out, though, I didn't like the look of it after all. Somehow the focal seemed to call for a copper chain to go with the octopus.
Rummaging through my supply drawers, however, I only found chain in the wrong size and I really, really didn't want to make my own chain. So I went online shopping instead, but again the chains were either too small or didn't have the right look.
In the end, I found infinity links, which seem to mimic the loops of the tentacles, and used them with jump rings to make a chain. Luckily, I bought just the right amount!

Is this my vision? Heck no, it couldn't be much further from it. I wanted the octopus and the shark all by themselves, maybe with a few beads to hint at the ocean. Had the breaks be in different spots, I might have managed to do it.

Did I save the shark, though? I think so. Another broken piece that didn't go into the trash, but will be shining on. (The urge to get philosophical about broken beauty is big, but I'll spare you!)

The big hug - Part 1

Over ten years ago, I got several boro lampwork pendants from a very talented artisan, manatees (you can see one of them here), a dolphin (you have seen him before as well), and a shark. The pendants are absolutely gorgeous, but it took months for them to ship which put me off ordering more. That's a real pity because I have not seen any since that come even close to them.
Also the shark broke in transport. I got a replacement, but I was determined to find a way of using the broken one as well (I've done that more than once with components, but of course never sold those).

If you haven't noticed it yet, I don't just love sharks, but also octopuses.
This is a picture of just some of those I made over the years. A tiny one, bigger ones, a really big one. Ah, have you already seen it? Sharks!

I experimented with the broken pendant first. The idea had been to hide the glue marks behind tentacles, but show as much of the shark as possible.
It needed a lot of fiddling, but I managed. The pendant got the official name "The hug" because to me those two were friends rather than enemies.
If you think the second octopus-shark hug was easier to make with the experience gained, you would be wrong. Lampwork is really slippery and the tentacles had to sit just the right way to hold the shark safely. The loop on the back of the tail is the only spot where the octopus is actually wired to the shark itself.

The second pendant sold and the first one went to a friend (of course she knew about the glued spots).
I'll be honest, I quickly regretted not keeping one for myself, simply because it proved impossible to find another shark like these.

After searching for a long time, I finally found one and was so happy! It was much smaller than the other ones, but so beautiful.
Somehow I never got around to making something with it, though. There was always something else to try out and wirework was already becoming more difficult for me.
When it started getting really hard on my thumb, however, I knew it was now or never before I wouldn't be able to do it anymore at all. It had been a while since I had played with copper and it felt so good, but it took a lot of breaks to get my octopus finished over the next few weeks.

Talking of breaks ... when I was finally done and wanted to take the octopus to the kitchen to oxidize it, I missed that the shark, which had been in the same box, got tangled in some still loose wire ends. Yes, you have be quite stupid not to notice you are holding two things, but sometimes I am.

It could have fallen in the hallway on the one vinyl floor I have, but no, it fell in the kitchen, on the hardest of all my floors.
You know how some things seem to be happening in slow motion and yet it's impossible for you to do anything about them? Like the time I cut my finger and fingernail with the bread knife and my brain only woke up and told me not to cut there when I had already started bleeding like crazy.
There wasn't a chance for me to catch the shark before it hit the tiles and pieces started jumping. The nose and the tail had broken off (seems to be a thing, the same happened to my friend with her dolphin). I could only find the nose and part of the tail, though.

It may sound ridiculous to you, but I was devastated.
I couldn't replace this shark, no matter how much I looked around. There were a few lampwork sharks, both pendants and figurines and they were pretty, no doubt about that, but none of them had this elegance, none of them spoke to me.
I didn't even want to look at the octopus anymore which says a lot.
Then something unexpected happened and yes, I'm totally saying this as a cliffhanger.

See you for part 2, I hope!