Slighty Creepy Candlesticks

From the same estate sale that brought you the ceramic skull, I now give you marginally spookified candlesticks.  When I purchased these candlesticks I had every intention of painting them black and replacing the beads with black ones.  But the more I looked at them, the more I fell in love with the existing marbled colors.  It seemed a shame to bury all that depth under flat black.

So if I wasn't going to turn them a spooky shade of black, I had to figure out another way to creep them up.  My other self imposed challenge was to use stuff I already had.

First I took them apart cleaned all the rusted areas with vinegar, after doing a test patch, and then lightly oiled those areas.  Then they were really bright and cheery looking, so I had to put an end to that.  After some contemplation I decided to use black shoe polish to darken things up.  I applied it to the grooves and creases and then wiped off the excess.

I figured skull beads would lend a little creepiness, but I didn't want to use my good skull beads for this.  Just so happens I have a bunch of plastic skull pony beads. I painted them with the same textured primer paint that I used on the ceramic skull.  Then gave them a coat of black, sponged on  Renaissance Brown and highlighted with Champagne Gold.  I have probably a half dozen paints from the Deco Art Dazzling Metallics line and I really love the colors, much richer than other brands I have used.

The downside of using pony beads is the hole was too big.  To fix that I forced 3mm round beads into the top and bottom of the beads. Some I forced a bit too much and split a few beads.  The beads were cheap coated plastic wannabe white pearls, so yay for using up more junk!  But boo, now I had to paint over the part of them that was visible.  But this time I waited until everything was assembled to touch up the paint in case I dinged anything up.

All in all I like the way the skull beads turned out.  I definitely see myself using them on bottles in the future.  I might even split a few on purpose to get a lower profile.  The nice thing is the mold line runs down either side of the face, so when they do split it's in the perfect spot.

I tried incorporating as many of the original beads as possible. I even refrained from redoing the wiring on the beaded links, which was really hard for the perfectionist in me. I wanted to prove to myself that if every wire link wasn't absolutely perfect the world wouldn't end and it didn't.

I did replace the original split rings, which were too poorly constructed to ignore.  Fortunately I happen to have some antique copper split rings that I bought by accident.  Split rings are awesome for durability, but I don't like the way they look. I don't why, I just don't.  With my jewelry I always double up on jump rings whenever the design allows for the added security.  Here I think a single jump ring would have sufficed and looked better, but since I was on a roll using up junk I've been sitting on, split rings it was.

I touched up the paint when everything was on the candlesticks.  I held a gloved hand behind the strands so I didn't paint the candlestick, but everything else including the wire got a little paint on it and that's ok.  After I touched up the skull beads I purposely sponged paint on all the other beads to give them a more uniform look.

So subtly creepy, far from perfect, not even close to my original vision and I'm ok with that.