Cinnamon Jewellery

The more you do it the easier it gets {unless you play football for England that is.....} That saying is definitely true when it comes to using a jeweller's saw. From really not enjoying cutting metal with a saw and using shears if it was at all possible, I now love using my saw and wielded it almost like a pro {almost} to cut out some cute shapes recently.  I'd downloaded a lot of shape silhouettes from a graphics site that had a 7 day free trial a couple of weeks ago and I chose a frame shape and a five petal flower shape to start with. I resized the shapes in Word then printed them out and stuck them onto the metal. The flower shape was a bit trickier that the frame shape but I got there eventually. I domed the flowers and bezel set a London Blue topaz cabochon in the centre. It's the first time I've used the LB topaz and I must say it is a beautiful sky blue stone. Keeping with the blue theme I set turquoise and sodalite cabochons on the copper ...

I've been meaning to make some copper bangles with ceramic beads for a while now. I bought some pretty pinkish and green ceramic beads a while ago and they've sat in my bead box patiently waiting for their moment of glory. It has now arrived! I decided to photograph how I made the bangles in the hope it will inspire someone/anyone to have a go. It's an easy project and as long as you use ceramic or lampwork beads or anything that has been kiln annealed you should find the beads behave themselves during soldering and don't explode. The most important thing to consider before you start is to make sure your bead hole is big enough for the wire you are going to use. The holes in these pink ceramic beads were a little bit smaller than the 2mm wire I used so I made them bigger using a round needle file. I tried various methods for enlarging the hole - using a drill bit and ball burr with my Dremel but they didn't do a lot so I stuck with using the file. ...

One of my favourite jewellery makers to watch on YouTube is Soham Harrison . His calm manner and straightforward explanations make him very easy to watch. He posts new videos regularly and I caught up with some of them a while ago. One of the videos showed how to make twisted bangles using round wire. I make a lot of bangles in copper and silver so I'm always on the lookout for new ideas and I really liked the look of them. They are very easy to make and basically involve annealing a length of round wire before flattening three sections of it using a rolling mill or hammer. You then anneal the wire again, fix one end into a vice and grip the other end in locking pliers and twist. The whole piece of wire turns creating twists in the flattened sections. You then cut the wire to length and make a bangle as usual. A really simple idea with very pretty results! Here's a few I made...... ...with a single twist. This was my first practice bangle with just one twi...