Katara's Necklace

This is my other recent project, Katara's Necklace from Avatar: The Last Airbender. On the bottom you see my mock-up I did to figure out how many beads I would need and how I wanted to lay them out, and above is a picture of what it looks like on my neck after it was completed.

A little about the design:
In the anime, her necklace appears to be a ribbon with a medallion hanging off the center of it. But Katara is from a tribe of people inspired by Inuit/Native American cultures, and the storyline puts emphasis on the fact that these necklaces are hand carved/crafted as a symbol of a man's devotion to his future wife. So I thought that this piece of jewelry probably would look a little more significant if it were real and decided to mess around with how it might look. That's where the mock up came in, and then once I had that, I had to go ahead and make it real, too!

About the creation:
The separators in white are made out of sculpey clay, which were baked and painted, then sanded down to appear more like they were carved that way. If you don't recognize it, the kanji I used there is from the opening sequence, which roughly translated means "water is kind" or "water is adaptive".
The center medallion is actually a painted shell, to which I added the waterbending logo.
I don't have a picture of the back but it's tied together with suede- which, by the way, is not working out very well. I might have to take off the suede and use something else, the necklace keeps coming loose when I wear it. Anyone have any suggestions on how to stop that from happening?