Pottery Shard Pendants

A few years ago, I met someone at a trade show who had boxes of broken Native American pottery from the Southwest.  I mentioned that it would be fun to make jewelry out of the pieces and promptly filed it away under "cool conversations from the road that will turn into anything".  A few weeks later, a surprise package arrived filled with pottery shards!  There was a quickly scrawled note on a torn out sheet of spiral notebook paper.  It said, "Have fun!"

Over the years, I thought about the box.  The shards were pretty coarse, so I thought that I might throw them in the tumbler and see what happened.  I did with mixed results.  Some of the pieces had nicely worn down edges.  Others... well... they completely dissolved and created a grainy sludge at the bottom of the barrel.

I decided to do a soldering experiment and used the tumbled pottery shards to create the pendants.  They're not perfect, but I'm glad that I finally got around to working with them.  I still have a box left and plan on revising this idea and expounding upon it.