Glass clasp solution.... and the toggles have it!

I am in a good mood today, I finally completely and utterfly finished my fancy dongle necklace and even made a clasp for it.

I have spent many hours trying to work out a clasp solution for the glass necklaces and last night, thought well .... bugger it, I will try making my own glass toggle clasp.  The added bonus of making a glass clasp is that 1. it will match the necklace and 2. I can genuinely say that the necklace is completely and utterly glass in its ENTIRETY!

I had given making glass toggle clasps a bit of a rip in the past and needless to say had only limited success.  They did work, but looked unwieldy and ugly and I suppose I didn't have the experience I do now and they weren't particularly neat and round so I was loathe to put one of those ugly monstrosities onto my painstakingly made dongle necklaces....... but I have now changed my mind!

Here is a pic of the toggle I made last night for the latest necklace.  I decided to use some of the helix twist cane for the loop rather than just some clear and I think it looks great.  I used a short bit of helix cane with clear blobs at the end for the toggle bit and just measured the whole thing as I made it.  Actually I did stupidly make the toggle stick first and then had to match up the loop...... the second one I made I did the other way around and that was MUCH easier!  I also found that if the loop is more of an oblong shape then the toggle stick is easier to get in lengthways and then sits better at one of the smaller ends.  The other issue I had to sort out was how to get the whole shebang to sit nicely.  I had put a stem on the toggle stick and found that if I bent that stem at nearly right angles it sits beautifully against the neck!

Oh, you might see that I also popped my signature against the loop end too..... had to sneak in somewhere didn't I. 

Below is a pic of where I thought I would try something a bit new.... a bit "dangly-er".  Here is a pic of the start of that next experiment.......... I am obviously having some fun with these, even though they take hours and hours at the torch (the dongle necklace took me more than 12 hours of torch time counting making the chain (which I am getting much faster at) then making the components for the dongles (either murrini or helix twists) and then of course, putting the lot together.  Interestingly it is all worth it when its finished off, definitely some job satisfaction to be had there!