certifiable

for the past two weekends, I've been driving up to Nashua to take a level 2 certification class in Art Clay Silver at Carol Babineau's studio. For those of you unfamiliar with ACS's cert programs, they're fairly intense- several projects to be completed on site in a limited amount of time.
The cert programs have just been re-written and with a couple of the old projects eliminated (the brass wire and silver pendant and the gauze over clay bead-two of my favorites)  and several of the remaining  projects changed .
So I've been busily crafting, refining and firing away. Today marked the completion of my in-class projects and now I can begin obsessing about what to make for my 3 "submit to be juried" pieces - a ring, a brooch and a pendant , all meeting specific fabrication guidelines.

I do know that the pendant will definitely NOT have a stone as large as the one I created for my in-class project. It was a great learning experience on a couple of levels- setting a stone with corner, and setting a REALLY big stone.  Another challenge has been trying to get the perfect photograph of all the pieces together. aside for a bit of focus issue in the right corner of the really big pendant, this is the best I've been able to do.
of course part of the problem is using a flash with all that shiney silver.
the Dragonfly Inro has different dragonfly scenes on each side - one with bent grasses, the other with cattails, and int underside of the inro cover is adorned with 2 baby dragonflies. Grasses and reeds embellish the sides of the box, too.

so now I'm cruising my favorite supplier sites, trying to find just the perfect stone for the pendant I've designed - either moonstone or a light blue stone would probably be perfect in a 10mm round. The pin gave me the most fits, but I've finally come up with a design I like - can you pick it out of this group of some of the sketches I did for early designs?