Apologies

Sorry, folks I accidentally deleted the last post.  My bad.  Anyway, thanks to John de Rosier, and to Sarah (Saturday Sequins) for your kind thoughts.

Be back around the first of August.

More Cold Connecting

These little gems, said fallaciously, are reconstituted turquoise.  Bah!  No more turquoise than I am.  I'm sure these beads are dyed howlite. I bought them sometime back to use in an Autumn theme necklace.  That didn't happen, got shelved for whatever reason. Going through some bead boxes and re-discovering them, decided to use them someway, somehow, and cold connecting to metal was a thought, so in the pic below, you see what happened.  Well, not too bad. I've seen worse.

The micro bolts haven't been swan off.  Leaving them on makes a prop an gives a better picture, I think.  

Had to redrill the holes and used a diamond coated twist drill bit for that.  The material isn't very hard,  and was able to drill without a water bath.   Go slow and don't overheat drill or the material.  Must have been ix or seven workers in the bead factory drilling holes as they were not consistent from bead to bead.  Typical of the beads you get from the Far East.  The beads are also inconsistent in size and shape.  But that's o.k. in some applications.  

Nuts, now I have to make jump rings.  Not one of my favorite things to do.