Producing new from a mixture of old and new

A couple of years ago, one of the exchange groups I was a member of had a “theme” of “Victorian” for that month’s exchange.  I was looking through a couple of reference books and the two ornaments I came up with were:





 














Using chenille stems, vintage glass beads, faux pearls, some wire and pressed Czech glass beads, I designed these.  Since then I have formed additional images and will most likely continue creating ornaments along a similar vein.  I had several strands of vintage garland that had several broken beads in them so I decided to cut the strands and use individual beads.  Since then I have found more strands of re-produced garlands incorporating additional colors, as well as finding a few new designs.


One of the problems I encountered was the tensile strength of the chenille stems.  Casual brushing against the ornament resulted in deforming.  As the white and gold illustrates, even the hanging to photograph resulted in the arms becoming mis-aligned.  Each time I have exhibited these, tweaking of the stem was necessary.  But the ornaments made during the late 1800s most likely suffered the same problems..