A YouTube Gem I Have To Share!

 

If you're a budding metalsmith who wants to watch decent how-to videos made by an experienced jeweller then have a look at Soham Harrison on YouTube. I discovered his videos a couple of weeks ago and love watching them! 

Easy to follow - in other words no weird music/total silence/blurred images or hands in the way, Soham's 141 videos cover a huge range of projects including claw setting, bangles, rings, bezel setting, sweat soldering and die forming plus some on how to use various tools and then there's the one on making creme brulee :D

He has a very calm manner and explains things clearly plus explains what to do if something doesn't go as it should. They're great to watch if you need a bit of inspiration too.

Silver Jewellery Course Project - The Last One

This Tuesday night (14th May) is the last week of my silver jewellery course. I feel a bit sad to be honest as I've met some lovely people and had a lot of fun. I've also learned stuff!

The main reason I went on the course was to learn how to bezel set and hopefully to become more confident with soldering and piercing. Well I certainly feel a lot better when I'm sawing and piercing now. I don't have a proper jeweller's workbench and have to make do with working on the diningroom table and in the kitchen so sawing metal was a bit of a challenge as the table is too low. I used to resort to sitting on a silly little plastic stool and feeling uncomfortable and a bit stressed about it all. Then I thought it might help if I used a G-clamp to attach my bench peg to the table instead of the metal clamp that came with it (that I'd managed to bend out of shape!) and use my computer chair to sit on as I can adjust the height. The result - a much better position and much quicker and confident sawing. Hallelujah!!

My soldering has improved too and I've overcome my fear of holding small things in position whilst I'm soldering. By this I mean attaching jump rings and earwires to the ends and backs of pieces. My hand isn't the steadiest and I have a tendency to panic slightly if things slip. I still use gravity and my third hand to help sometimes but some of the fear has now gone :D 

I've also realized that my sight when doing close up stuff has deteriorated in the last few months and using an old pair of my Mum's reading glasses helps immensely! I can now see those little bits of solder that have jumped off from where I fiddled about for ages putting them. The glasses do make me look like Deirdre Barlow though .....good job no one can see me.

 The photos are of the last project I made at college - a pendant using etched silver and a frosted yellow glass cab. It's simple in style like a lot of my stuff but I love the contrast in colour with the oxidized silver and the almost glowing yellow of the glass. I rarely use yellow anything when I make jewellery so it made a nice change. I decided I didn't want a normal hanging hole so made a jump ring that I soldered onto the front of the pendant then pierced out the centre. The frosted glass cabs came from an Etsy shop in Turkey and I have several different colours that are currently being turned into earrings and pendants as we speak.

For the last week of college I will be taking full advantage of the rolling mill to texture my own copper sheet for using at home. I would love a rolling mill at home but lack of a proper workroom means I don't have the space for it, alas. Last week I used it to flatten some thick gauge (2.6mm and 3.25mm) copper wire which I then twisted with the help of a vice and huge pair of pliers. I've used the twisted copper wire to make three bangles, yet to be photographed, but I will post the photos as soon as I've done them.

Another good outcome of going to college was that I was classed as a student and could register at the London Assay Office, which is the office nearest to me, for half price, saving £75 which isn't to be sniffed at. It means that if (when) I start making bigger sterling silver pieces I'm ready for sending them off for hallmarking. I checked with the assay office as I wasn't sure if a night school class would class me as a student and the answer was yes as long as the course is a fair length and not just a couple of weeks type of thing.

Overall, despite already knowing how to do some of the things we did at college I've really enjoyed it. I have learned new things and I could go back for a 2nd year in September - the 2nd year isn't a new class in it's own right but basically tagged onto the learners class but doing different projects. Decisions, decisions!!

Cinnamon Jewellery Website - Finished At Last!

After rather a long delay - almost a year - I'm happy and relieved to say my very own website Cinnamon Jewellery has been set free to roam the internet wilderness.

I bought the .com and co.uk domain names last May with the intention of making a start on my own site but other things got in the way, the amount of work involved was putting me off and I started having doubts about whether anyone would actually find it so it just got put on the back burner.

But with laughable views to my shop on Folksy and dwindling sales there I thought it was time to start work on my own website. I made a start about six weeks ago starting with the boring stuff - privacy policy and terms and conditions, delivery and returns and I even designed my own 404 and contact page. I worked on it for about 1 hour a day to avoid burnout (!) as some of it is incredibly boring to do and slowly got more into it and into making it more personal than a shop on a selling platform.

I added jewellery info and supplies info pages with images and played around with Paint Shop Pro to create little text graphics for the home page and category titles like the one above and below.

I really enjoyed the design aspect of it at the same time wanting to keep it looking quite clean and easy to navigate. I kept the background white and the text a brown colour which sounds horrible but it works (I think!) I saved the homepage till last as I wanted to get all the items for sale done first. That was fun (no it wasn't) and time-consuming as they are the same items as I have in my Etsy and Folksy shops so I needed to rewrite all the descriptions to avoid creating duplicate pages which isn't helpful search engine wise.
When I'd finally finished adding all my items I let myself play with the home page. I had a vision of how I wanted it to look in my head - big photo at the top, explain what the website was about then smaller photos for each category with a bit of text below. That's basically how it turned out. It took three attempts to get it "right" and several template changes before reverting back to the one I'd chosen right at the start - you can tell I'm a woman :D

 Here's a screen shot in two parts. That's how it looks but with less space after the "Welcome to Cinnamon Jewellery". I tried to take a screen shot of the whole homepage but it would only take the visible part on my screen so I did half the screen at a time and I've put the two images together here.

 Every time I thought I'd finished and it was ready to publish I'd find something else I'd missed. There's a lot more I could do to customize it and I'm sure I will tweak a few things as I go along. It also has a blog which I did think about binning and just linking to this one but I think I'll keep it as the blog page has the sidebar and links so that could be an advantage.

When I finally was ready to publish it I thought I'd better preview it first and ended up with a page and a half of notes of things that needed sorting, like spelling mistakes, image links not working, etc, etc! So I sorted those things out and published it just over a week ago. No sales yet but I have had a fair amount of views considering it's just over a week and I even remembered to set up a filter in GA to block my own views.

It's early days but I do like my little website and I'm sure it will grow and improve as I learn. Now I just have to sort out uploading my items to my Google Merchant account so they appear in Google shopping. Been having fun all week with doing that (very wrongly) and I think Samshika from Google who's dealing with it probably hates me by now........

Rainbow Lovelies - Enamel Stud Earrings

I posted recently about some enamel earrings I made recently and how I was going to make some more small enamelled stud earrings. My first attempt at them a while ago was a bit fraught as it involved using enamel solder and enamelling the back over the soldered on post. I hadn't done much soldering at that point so was a bit, well, scared really! It worked ok then and it worked ok a few days ago when I made the little group above. I thought I'd take a family portrait before they were separated!

Pea green topped with lichen and robin's egg blue

 I could make life easy for myself and just enamel the front like a lot of the enamelled studs you see on Etsy, I could but then I'd be waiting for the cracks to appear in the enamel which they have a habit of doing on thin gauges of metal without any counter enamel. I know this because I tried it :D

They are "easy" to do really, just a bit fiddly with being pretty small at 7.5mm. The orange speckled pair were one of those experiments where I couldn't think what colour to do so tried a base of nut brown with sunset orange, pastel pink and brown with a bit more pink and brown added on top. You still can't really see the pink! They make me think of Bet Lynch and animal prints for some reason......

I looked up the 2013 spring/summer colour predictions and this mint green is in apparently.

And a colour I haven't used much so far - Robin's Egg Blue, a really delicate light blue which is quite hard to photograph as the light bounces off the colour.

New Etched Copper Findings

Another of the many, many things on my to-do list is to make some etched copper findings to add to my shops. I made a start a couple of weeks ago with these pre-cut copper "diamonds" - I call them diamonds as I never know quite how to describe them - squares on the diagonal maybe.... Anyway sold in pairs they'd be great to add to earrings or with another hole at the opposite point they could be used as links. Oxidized. Of course.

I also made some small etched 9mm discs with hanging hole. They would be perfect to add to the ends of earrings or onto bracelets or necklaces to create some movement as charms. They could go just about anywhere you can hang things! Sold in packs of 6.

Colour Splash! Torch Enamel Earrings

I've been concentrating on bezel setting and soldering a lot recently so have been working mainly with metals of the silver and copper hue. So a bit like when your body tells you you need chocolate (all the time in my case) I got out the enamels recently to feed my craving for colour.

Enamels used to scare me when I first started using them and I was ultra careful about not contaminating them so as not to discover those little black specks and tiny pieces of wire wool that you never see until after you've fired something. I'm still careful but maybe a bit more relaxed these days. I recently had a problem with some transparent enamel I'd washed several months ago. I used it over opaque and it cracked. Not straight away because enamel likes to lull you into a false sense of security sometimes. No, one piece cracked a few hours after it was fired and the other a couple of days after. I reckoned it was because the washed enamel had been hanging around for a while and was probably contaminated.

I washed some more and it's worked fine this time as the earrings below show.

 I can't be the only one who finds the idea of washing a dry powder slightly odd. When I started torch enamelling and read that you needed to wash transparents if you want to use them over opaques I thought it seemed a bit of a chore and how can you "wash" a powder, how does it dry? 

It's really easy to do and involves putting a small amount of enamel into a shot glass or similar and filling it with water. You stir it, let it settle then pour off the water. This helps to remove a lot of the dust and other bits in the enamel powder you don't want. Do this until the water is clear(ish) using filtered water for the last rinse then blot as much of the excess water off the wet enamel powder with a kitchen roll as you can. Take care not to touch the enamel with the kitchen roll to avoid getting bits in the enamel. Then spread the wet enamel onto a clean piece of paper on top of a baking tray and put in the oven set to the lowest heat setting for about 10 -15 minutes to dry. When it's dry tip the enamel into a clean pot labelled so you know what it is. You do need to make sure everything you use is clean and doesn't have any bits or dust on it to avoid getting those bits in the washed enamel as they will show up when you fire it!

A bit of a fiddle but worth it. The alternative is muddy looking dirty colours.

I used three opaques for these - aqua, pea green and lichen green. My Mum used to say to me that blue and green should never be seen, usually as I was just off out on a Saturday night wearing blue and green! I never took any notice and reckon if these colours are good enough for nature they're good enough for me!

The colours in these orange and brown earrings remind me of an exotic colourful beetle. I used orange transparent over nut brown with a sprinkling of brown on top.

Next I'm planning on making some more small enamelled studs. I made some of these a while ago when I had just started soldering and found it terrible fraught and stressful! Enamel and solder aren't always easy to combine. I had to use enamel solder for the posts and was so worried things would melt or that the enamel would react with the solder. It didn't and everything was fine but I didn't enjoy the experience very much so haven't made any more, apart from a recent custom order. As I'm a bit more confident with the soldering part now I've decided to make some more even though they are fiddly to do. They are very cute when they're finished though :D