Skip to main content

A Jewellery School In Eastbourne?!!


Imagine my delight when looking through the latest issue of Making Jewellery magazine I noticed a small article on The Sussex Jewellery School. Ooh, I thought, I live in Sussex, I wonder where................  then I noticed it was in my hometown of Eastbourne! I don't believe it!

I checked out the website and contacted them to ask if they minded me doing a blog piece about them. They were quite happy, so here's a bit of info for any fellow jewellery makers in the Eastbourne area!

The Sussex Jewellery School opened in January and is situated very close to the railway station in Commercial Road, Eastbourne. The school is a mews-type premises over two floors with a 400ft studio, kitchen and common room.

Classes are available in PMC (Beginners and Advanced), Resin Jewellery and from Autumn they are starting classes in enamelling on silver. They will also be running advanced courses on adding gold to PMC and making silver boxes.

Tempted? I know I am. I've wanted to learn to make PMC jewellery for a while now so was thrilled to see they ran classes in just that. Most of the classes are held at weekends from 10am to 5pm, although there are also some classes on a Monday and Friday.


 They also offer one to one tuition by the hour, a kiln firing service and studio sessions where you can work on your own pieces in the studio after you've taken one of their classes.

At the moment my job clashes with the class times (bum!) but as soon as it's possible I will be booking a Beginners class in PMC. The price is £105 (correct at time of writing) which I don't think is bad for seven hours of learning something new and making up to three items of beautiful (hopefully!) jewellery. Watch this space!



Visit The Sussex Jewellery School website

Comments

  1. I have awarded you a sunshire award for your great blog. Collect your award from www.cjjewellery.blogspot.com.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oooh! Sounds good to me ~ I'm not too far away and have been reading about PMC jewellery. I'd love to give it a go!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lucky! I would LOVE a jewellery school in my town. The closest ones are in London I think, which isn't too far but being in my town would be so convenient :) £105 really isn't bad at all, especially if you're going to make three items - you definitely get your money's worth! I paid about £65 for mine, which was a one-to-one session, and I came home with a pretty pendant :) You'll love it. x [sorry for rabitting on!]

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great article. Lucky you , Tracy. I wish there was something like this in Manchester, but there is nothing available except basic beading classes here, so I just opened my packet of PMC and got stuck in!

    ReplyDelete
  5. (Chuckling) I'm glad you think our price is fair one of my students managed to make five pieces of jewellery on the Beginnings in Silver Clay day (though she did work small - she seemed to have the never-ending packet of PMC3!). I adore teaching the classes: I'm passionate about raising standards in silver clay work! I'm happy to say that students come from far and wide, and say very nice things about their day.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Your comments and questions are very welcome!
If you would prefer to contact me directly please use the contact form on my "get in touch" page.
Any comments containing links will be deleted so please don't waste your time.....

Popular posts from this blog

My Jewellery Shed Gets A Lick Of Paint

At the end of last summer, after an incredibly busy few months jewellery-wise, I decided to take a break and repaint my shed. I'd painted it a pale green colour when I first got it and it was starting to look a bit faded and sad. So I did what I expect most people do and started looking online at what wonderful colour I could repaint it. There are lots of great colours out there by Cuprinol and Ronseal and the DIY stores own brands. I took a long time deciding on a colour then got in the car to go and buy the paint. That's when I discovered that B&Q and Homebase only carry a limited selection of shed paint colours {8 if you're lucky} and if you then find something in stock you do like they quite often don't have it in the size pot you need! So the colour I bought was a bit of "Oh buggar it, that'll have to do". Luckily it turned out to be similar to what I'd originally wanted by the time I'd finished the third coat - yes it took three coat...

Etching Copper With Ferric Chloride

 I decided recently that etching is one of my favourite things to do with metal. I read about it online quite a while ago and immediately thought it looked cool but the thought of using an "acid" and having to find somewhere to store it (a perennial problem when you don't have a workroom) put me off. So instead I admired etched copper from afar. Until I got a bee in my bonnet about it again and bought Lexi Erikson's copper etching dvd. Lexi Erikson is very good at explaining jewellery techniques and making them seem much more straightforward than they first appear. I already knew that ferric chloride was a salt and not an acid so wouldn't eat my flesh through to the bone if I accidently spilled some on my hand. The dvd made me feel much more comfortable about having a go so I ordered some ferric chloride from ebay and bought some stamps and StazOn ink from a local craft shop. My first attempt went ok but for some reason I left the copper to etch for an hou...

Amazing Enamel Effects

Buying a kiln recently has given me the chance to experiment with enamelling on larger pieces of copper and to produce some really cool effects. These effects happen when you combine different types of enamel. I usually use smaller flat pieces of copper for making enamelled earrings and have had some of these effects happen when firing with a torch but they are much more obvious when you use larger pieces. I made a few practice pieces which you can see in the photos below. This was flux {a transparent enamel not to be confused with soldering flux!} applied straight onto copper and fired until the copper was a bright golden colour. Then I added a layer of liquid enamel in green and red over the flux and fired again.  The lines and spots form when the enamel becomes hot enough to start moving and in this case the transparent pushes through the liquid enamel layer forming these cool lines and spots. The effect is better in the green liquid enamel than the red.  N...