Cinnamon Jewellery

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 orang...

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.

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...