Cinnamon Jewellery

So my love/hate relationship with etching sterling silver continues. I've tried a few times now and always end up with different results most of them not that great to be honest. I've tried connecting the silver and a piece of copper to a 9v battery and also heating the ferric nitrate. Sometimes the results are good sometimes not so good. I currently have an etched piece of silver sheet waiting to be reticulated and rid it of the mess that is the etched "pattern".  I now know that using stamps and Stayz On ink just doesn't work with silver - the time needed to etch using ferric nitrate is much longer than etching copper and the ink starts to wear away after about an hour. This results in the pattern being patchy as the resist is eaten away and the silver ends up quite lumpy and course looking. I have yet to try using pnp paper. I don't know why but it all seems a bit of a faff to do. I don't have a laser printer so would need to find somewhere or...

Image : Community Friend/Flickr   I found out yesterday that someone had recently cloned my debit card and was using it to top up their mobile phones. What a horrible feeling! It's the first time it's ever happened to me and I felt really angry that someone could do something so despicable. I also felt slightly panicky at the thought of my account being emptied before my eyes. I only found out when I had a phone call from Cookson Gold saying payment had been declined for an order I'd just placed. I tried to pay again and it was declined again so I checked my account online and saw the five payments taken out without my knowledge. Just small amounts that they must have hoped I wouldn't notice but I think the bank had put a stop to any more debit payments as it must have flagged up as suspicious at this point. It happened once before but that time it was me on a bit of a spending spree and the hold put on my account was lifted after I made a phone call :D I ...

I recently decided to revamp the storage boxes I keep my small jewellery making tools and supplies in. If you are anything like me and struggle to make jewellery in a room that is meant for other uses - the dining room and kitchen in other words - instead of having one of those wonderful workrooms/studios/sheds where you can spread things out, you probably get how important having enough storage space is. The dining room table was only used rarely anyway before I started taking over and now isn't used to eat off at all, just for cats to sit on and things to get dumped on to be put away "later". This is what I had previously......  Perfectly good reinforced cardboard drawers but they were starting to get a bit tatty and they just weren't big enough ! As you can see I have stuff everywhere, little bits of stuff and big bits of stuff that does start to get untidy and annoying after a while. Bear in mind the photo was taken when I'd tidied up and not whe...

Why make simple copper bangles when you can make "tricky" copper bangles? That's tricky to me anyway, other people would probably find them super simple! I'm talking about copper bangles with five small sterling silver concave discs soldered to the outside. Not hard to make just tricky. I wanted to combine copper and silver as I love the look of the two metals together. The fiddly bit was the soldering of the silver discs to the outside of the copper bangles. I wanted then evenly spaced and was about to Google how to divide a circle into five parts when I realized I know how to do this already - just remember the length of wire you used for the bangles and divide by five! After quite a lot of faffing about with my third hand and my fibre board soldering block (and swearing, mustn't forget that) I got the first disc soldered to the first bangle. Only 14 more to go. I had to pickle in between each soldering too which made it quite a laborious process but I...