Help!

[tanaise]

I have this necklace. It's probably my most favorite piece of jewelry right now, it's the first necklace I could ever wear at all (I have Issues with things around my neck sometimes.) and I adore it. Every time I wear it, people say nice things about it. And I dropped it down the elevator shaft a month or so ago.

It was rescued, and has little damage to it, considering that it fell 5 stories. I washed it, ran it through the sterilizer, and gave it a close examination, and I think it's utterly salvagable.





see? no major damage. there are probably 5 or so chipped peppers, where the tip broke off, and about 3-5 broken peppers where they're only about half sized. So. Here comes the part that I need help with.
I figure I have 3 options for fixing it.
1) Find replacement peppers. I've never seen any like this, but I'm not that much of a bead person, it's usually just sort of when I'm bored or haven't bought my mother anything lately.
2) redistribute the peppers evenly (ish) so that you can't tell any are missing.
2a) figure out if there is anything to be done with the sort of broken ones (could they be 'sealed' off, does anyone know? The glass equivelent of melting a little wax so it would smooth off the edges a little? I know they wouldn't be as attractive as the unchipped ones, but better than having to take them all off) if not,
3) redistribute the peppers evenly, and in the process, put something different into the pendant position thus freeing up more peppers for the even redistributing

So, for the more jewelry oriented people out there, a) which sounds like the best bet, b) am I missing any good options, and c) has anyone bead-ish seen peppers like this elsewhere?
I have a closer-up photo, complete with scale object.

Comments

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

First, resize these pictures. I can't tell what the peppers look like because the pictures are too big to see on my screen.

Second, I went hunting on ebay. If you go to the craft--->bead art catagory and hunt for chili peppers, you find several listings for glass peppers. As I said, I can't tell from your pictures if any of them match, but it is a place to start.

If you find some that do match, or could be blended in, I think replacing the broken ones would be the best bet. Any decent jeweler should be able to do that if you find the right peppers.

Good luck!

[cissa.livejournal.com]

The broken peppers can be 'sealed", but whoever does it would need both a (glass) torch and an annealing kiln- else the melting process would likely stress the glass enough that it would explode at some point.

I would think that the broken peppers would need to be removed from the necklace to do this. In which case it may well be easier to jsut find replacement peppers and replace them- the actual peppers seem to be attached in a way that couple of pairs of pliers could achieve.

It's a REALLY cute necklace- I can see why you want to fix it up!

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Well, oddly enough, i may know someone with the right equipment, as my brother's girlfriend's aunt makes her own beads. I'm mostly worried about finding the right replacement peppers.