Cinnamon Jewellery

I recently had a query through my website about copper wire solder asking if I could give any tips on using it. Apparently it is very hard to cut and it wasn't flowing properly when heated. I do a lot of copper soldering and as I've only read about copper paste solder and never actually tried the paste or the wire I thought it would be a good idea to get some and give it a try myself! The copper wire solder is available on ebay and Amazon and is fairly inexpensive. I bought 2 ft of 18g {1mm} hard solder for £1.98 plus postage. It looks very much like copper wire as you can see from the photo above but it is very hard to cut. It's recommended that you use memory wire cutters to cut it but I didn't want to fork out £15 at Hobbycraft so I used the DIY store heavy duty metal snips I sometimes use to cut thicker sheet. I could have done with Hercules himself to help me to be honest but I did manage to cut a couple of small pieces of the wire solder that imm...

It's a bit of a colour explosion on my blog this week - courtesy of enamels and the wonderful world of plants. I've been flexing my sawing arm and produced these frame/moroccan style shapes from copper sheet which I then enamelled in a blast of green and turquoise opaque and transparent enamels. I also cut some {much simpler} drop shapes that I enamelled in a mix of foxglove purple, mauve and bitter green. The last two colours are recent purchases and I love them!  A couple of days ago I used my phone camera to take some quick snaps of my "garden" which is a really a small back yard {now even smaller thanks to my jewellery shed} which has a few pots in it. The plants are looking nice at the moment so I thought I'd capture them then play around with the photos on Fotor ...... Beautiful nasturtium leaves - no flowers {or blackfly} yet but I do love their shape and the pattern of the veins. Pretty pink geranium flowers An o...

To make a change from making bangles I decided to make a copper link bracelet recently. Since I've learned to solder I haven't attempted one yet and thought it would be a fairly easy, quick thing to make. It probably is if you're not me.................. I started with 2.6mm copper wire and cut several lengths in two different sizes. I annealed the wire and bent it to form rough D shapes which makes it easier to join the two ends. My first idea was to solder and shape the links into rounds, texture and finish them then cut half of them open again and resolder to link them all together. Looking at how they lay when they were linked together I then thought the wire was probably too thick for this idea and the links might not sit very well when the bracelet was worn so I now needed to think about how to join the large links together in an interesting way......... After some time thinking design thoughts {faffing about with copper wire in other words} I ca...

Any of you who read my blog regularly will know I moved my jewellery making stuff into a garden shed earlier this year. I'm well and truly settled in now but every so often I'm struck with how I can improve the way my shed is organized. One of the things I'm limited by is the fact it is a garden shed that's been clad so I can't just stick things up on the walls willy nilly. The cladding is attached to battens so if I want to put anything on the wall I have to screw it through the cladding and into a batten. Which obviously stops me putting things anywhere I want. This means I have to find other ways to attach things to the wall sometimes. I bought some magnetic strips on ebay a while ago with the idea of using them to hold some of my small metal tools. They also proved really useful to use with fridge magnets to hold bits of paper {all with very important things written on them of course} within easy reach when I'm working. This idea then made me think I n...