Cinnamon Jewellery

Like most metalwork jewellery makers I've developed a love of the tools I use and quite enjoy a browse in any shop that sells hammers and that kind of thing to see if there's something I could use. I sometimes come home with small toolish "things" that I don't even know the name of but think they look promising for use in my shed.... One of the tools that caught my eye recently was a mitre jig. A mitre jig or jeweller's jig is a small three part piece of steel that does some pretty wonderous things in the way of making a jewellery maker's life a lot easier! I've come across mitre jigs before {but only from a distance} and knew they were used to get straight edges and angles on things and that joiners used them but it all looked a bit complicated and technical and precise which isn't a word that always applies to how I do things. But after watching a very useful video by David Wilson via Cookson Gold on how to use a  mitre jig  I realize...

Carrying on from my post last week about Ice Resin experiments, I made some matching pairs of the curly whirly swirly designs that I've decided I like the most. After getting fairly well matched pairs by bending two pieces of the copper wire at the same time using my pliers, I soldered all the points where the wires met and sanded the shapes flat giving myself two very sore finger ends in the process. The next step was to add the coloured resin. I mixed up about 20ml for the first batch and divided it into four pots which I then coloured with acrylic paints. My first mistake... Attempting to do too much at once and ending up with a sticky mess. The acrylic paint does make the resin thicker and more glue-like and while the first two coloured resins were still fairly runny and easy enough to drip into the copper squiggles by the time I got to the last two I'd made from the first batch of resin they were very thick and sticky making adding them to the squiggles reall...

Or should I say more experimenting with Ice Resin! As a continuation to my  blog post  last week I have been at it again and doing some more interesting things with epoxy resin.  My first attempts didn't cure properly, possibly because I didn't measure the two parts accurately enough or it might have been because I didn't mix the acrylic paint properly before adding it to the resin. Anyway, my second attempts which were the swirly abstract shapes you can see in the bottom right photo below did cure I'm glad to say. They are now leaning up against my work shed window and look really pretty with the light shining through them :D  So armed with slightly more but still a fairly small amount of knowledge about resin I tried again on Wednesday. I made a few pairs of copper earrings, one with two little copper bowls soldered to the bottom and two more with pierced out shapes, then added some coloured resin. In my haste to get going with the resi...