Cinnamon Jewellery

I've been making bangles for a few years now but have never thought about making cuffs until recently. Cuffs are very popular especially in copper as some people believe the copper helps with arthritis pain {although there's no scientific proof of this}. I decided to start making a couple of narrow copper cuffs to see how it goes and whether they sell. Copper cuff with hammered bark texture  Copper cuff with leaf vein texture I spent a stupid amount of time trying to work out the sizing of cuffs which isn't as simple as it might seem! I make them to fit the buyer's wrist size not a general 6 inch length piece of metal fits all approach {it doesn't}. After making a couple for myself I finally worked out how to get the sizing right. I haven't had any returns yet so the sizing must be ok....:D Soon after I started listing the cuffs I got a request from a buyer in France who had bought one of my copper poppy bangles .... She asked to return...

For someone who's loved silver forever I seem to have an awful lot of scrap 9ct gold! Some of it is from gold chains and a ring I had when I was younger and some of it I was given by my Mum as she wasn't a big gold jewellery person either. She preferred wearing my early bead creations bless her! There's also a couple of scrap pebbles from previous projects. I started by melting it into as large a pebble as I could manage with my torch. I ended up with a slightly saggy looking black lump. As I thought gold wasn't supposed to oxidize I decided to look up exactly what 9ct gold contains and found out it's made up of 37.5% pure gold and the rest is made up of silver, copper and zinc. That's explains the oxidation........ This is the 9ct gold after pickling - still a bit grubby and you can see some of the copper on the surface. I then ran it through the rolling mill, annealing several times as I did so. This is the result. It sta...

I've been wanting to try anticlastic forming for such a long time now and I've had some of the tools I need to do it for over a year {oops!} Anyway I finally got round to it a couple of weeks ago. {The simplest definition of an anticlastic form is something that curves in opposite ways in two directions. Think of the shape of a saddle where the part that fits the horse curves in one direction and the part you sit on curves in another direction.} Just after Christmas I treated myself to a Durston bangle forming die set... It came with a mallet too but more about that later. Having this spurred me on to having a go so I cut a strip of copper, soldered it and formed it into a round shape. I marked the solder join with a Sharpie as a starting point reference and drew guide lines around the bangle to help guide the mallet strikes. The die set is very easy to use. You secure the steel bar in a vice then slide the die onto the bar. I threaded a broken burr into the...

It's been a bit quiet on the blog front for the past few weeks. I put my Etsy shop and website on holiday just before Christmas so I could have a break, relax and also get cracking with making new jewellery. I did quite a lot of relaxing {and scoffing chocolates, yum!} over Christmas and the New Year and enjoyed catching up with the end of the second season of The Affair, started watching the second season of Fargo {which to me seems so much better than the first} and other stuff I'd stockpiled with Sky+ . I did give my shed a proper clean too - even wiping down shelves which were covered with black dust {nice} and I even washed the windows :D I also got round to making some new jewellery. I felt the need to make some bronze earrings and decided to add some patterns to the sheet bronze with my rolling mill. I used a mix of textured card, leaf skeletons and brass texture sheet that I'd bought and some brass sheet that I'd etched with a stamped designs. ...