Fusion Beads 30 Day Bead Challenge: Day 5...

The challenge for the fifth day in the Fusion Beads 30 Day Bead Challenge was to, "whip up some festive and functional wine charms for your next party. Salut!"  In my younger days, when Red Solo Cups were a perfectly acceptable drinking vessel at parties, I thought that wine charms were a frivolous and unnecessary.  A Sharpie marker made distinguishing plastic cups easy and as an artist, I always had one readily accessible.

However, at a recent event at the shop where we served wine in glass stemware, I became acutely aware of how useful wine charms would have been to designate glasses.  (Scrubbing permanent marker off the glass wasn't an appealing option.)  Even though we had a small group that evening of five people, there seemed to be twenty glasses to wash by the end of the night.  The threat of fruit flies made the task urgent.  Washing glasses at the end of a very long workday was not particularly ideal.  So the idea of wine charms were elevated in my mind!

Ball chain is another thing that I'm not overtly fond of.  It reminds me of light-pulls in mosquito-filled cabin bathrooms.  Even though it can be edgy and add a modern flare to a design, I can't help but mentally hear the clink of the chain tapping against a naked bulb with bugs swarming around it.

With that said, I adore ball chain in this particular usage.  It makes putting together wine charms a breeze!  All you have to do is cut it to fit and string on an embellishment.  When planning an event, the last thing you should be worried about is laboring over fussy wine charms.  This type of wine charm is super easy to make and does a great job at marking who's glass belongs to who.  For this particular charm, I used a siam-colored Swarovski crystal round and a Mexican sugar skull pendant from Nina Designs.

Up for a creative challenge?  There's still a several weeks left to do.  You can also dip in and out of the 30 days and pick the ones that strike your fancy.  CLICK HERE for the entire calendar.