Last week I wrote about being haunted by a particular necklace. I like to think that haunting is an important aspect of creativity. Allowing your mind to linger on a design — or even an element of a design — and letting it simmer on the back burner gives you a chance to let it soak in. Percolate. Compost. Begin to grow.

Whether or not you’re able to sort out the reason something appeals to you, sooner or later you might find a connection to your own work. Maybe a design will help you find a solution to a piece that has you stuck. Maybe it will unlock a new direction already in your subconscious. Or maybe you can simply find a way to make a design your own — tweak the colors, rearrange the structure, use different materials, etc.

This haunting-sparks-creativity happened for me recently. The first time I saw Linda Rettich’s seed bead and pearl free-form necklace Drawn to nature, in our August issue, I was captivated. I wanted to construct my own collar of sea foam and washed-up chunks of treasure — something to make my neckline look as if it were ringed by shoreline and deposited bits of beach. A little later, I started working with a Sherry Serafini design for our December issue, and I fell just as deeply in love with it as Linda’s piece. (It’s the one pictured in the promo).

While bead shopping one day, I must have been aware of these two designs roaming around together in the back of my mind because I came home with a pile of fossils, stones, pearls, crystals, and geodes. After sleeping on it a bit, and playing around with capturing cabochons in right-angle weave nets, I came up with the necklace you see here.

What designs have you been drawn to for inspiration? What surprising and disparate elements have you combined to make a creation of your own?