Sweet tiny wire nests! So pretty added to product, collage, or even hanging from a delicate chain or ribbon and worn around your neck. Nests to me always represent motherhood, so I am especially fond of them. Above are photos of a couple on my Nest and Home bottles that were sold through my Etsy shop.
I use 24 guage wire, (brass, silvertone or sterling silver) and little cultured pearls or pearly-looking beads. You can find the little pearls through most jewelry/bead suppliers. I also have several different colors I found on jewelry from a thrift store.
Thread the beads onto the wire.
Turn, bend the wire around the beads threading back through itself here and there. You can’t mess this up, the more kinks the better. You can wrap bands of wire tightly around gathered rings of the nests for additional reinforcement a good idea when making nests for jewelry.

Using round-nose jewelry pliers or needle-nose pliers, bend, kink and twirl the wire further. I had a gold-tone leaf charm that I sanded down to the silver colored base and attached it with another small piece of wire.
Here’s the finished nest with extra wire curls extending and tucked into yet another watch case! {LINK}
You can patina your eggs with a golden-brown permant marker dabbed here and there as I did with the ones attached to the bottles.

No doubt you’ve been to DesignMom. In a nutshell, it’s one of the coolest blogs ever. It just is.

Last September, Gabrielle Blair, DesignMom herself, asked me to be a guest mom on her blog for a week. Who could resist? So, still feeling a bit under the weather (which today has driven my creativity into a wall), I thought this was a great opportunity to rehash a few old favorite posts from my stint as her guest.

143
Although I was too young to remember, it is told that the number 143 was always present on the back of every envelope of every letter that my father mailed to my mother while serving in the army. It’s code for “I love you”. The number represents the letter count for each word.

It’s a number my family still uses in correspondence to one another and one I sign off with when e-mailing my husband at the firehouse or jotting a note to my kids. And, because of its special meaning to me, I had a rubber stamp made with the number to use on various pieces of my collage art.

The other day I found the exact numbers, all by themselves, laying in order at an antique store. Those numbers now greet my family as they enter our home.