Here's a shot of the whole necklace. Ignore the bit where the clasp should be. I didn't have the right kind of clasp, and I really wanted to wear it yesterday, so I just stuck an extra split ring on and slipped it over my head. :) I'll be getting a nice chunky toggle for it today. I'm not crazy about how much those round white beads stand out, but there's no way I'm redoing it - those braided bits are a pain!
	This is the bead that inspired the whole thing. My LBS just got in some lovely lampwork, and I snapped this one up. I call it a sea anenome, thus the necklace title. :) You should have seen me digging through my black, green, yellow and white drawers. Those green bicones aren't Swarovski, btw, just Chinese crystal. Hmm, Swarovski would look nice with some of the other lampwork I bought, though . . . Anyway, if anyone can identify the maker of the bead, I'm really curious. The LBS didn't know. I'd love to point them to this page so they can see a piece of theirs in action.
	Here's a closeup of the braid. This is what I did in between each accent bead section. They're all 19 bead groups, with the black accented by a transparent yellow, an opaque white and a pearly lime bead. All are Czech 11's. There were a few problems with the braid. First, since I was braiding sections midstrand, the beads had a tendency to slide away, so I was braiding SoftFlex more than beads! Towards the end of making the piece, I finally got the idea to push up the beads part way through braiding, and that seemed to help. Also, as you can see on the left, 3 braided strands of seed beads don't meet up perfectly with a small accent bead, so there's bits of SoftFlex peeking through. Next time I'd do this on colored SoftFlex (I think it exists). On top of that, the braids had this tendency to fall apart on me. Love the look, though.