Cinnamon Jewellery

In my last blog post I wrote about some patterned bronze sheet I'd made using my rolling mill and that I'd then made some new earrings with the results. One of the pairs is made with a leaf vein texture. It's really easy to get a mirror image of the leaf vein texture by sandwiching a skeleton leaf between two sheets of metal which is what I did for these earrings. I then trimmed around the outline of the leaf shape and added a curve to the leaves so they looked a bit more like real leaves.  I used this forming block... I bought this on ebay a while ago and only recently found out it's designed to be a bangle forming block but it can be used to form curves in lots of different shapes. It always makes me think of a child's toy :D It added a nice curve to the leaf shape which is what I was after. I then soldered a jump ring to the top of the earrings and pierced out the centre to form the hanging hole for the earwires. I tidied u...

With Valentine's Day fast approaching I thought it was time to write my first blog post of 2013. I can't believe my last post was on the 15th of December! I've been busy jewellery-wise recently "doing" hearts. I have a couple of heart templates which I made use of as I'm no artist drawing-wise and earrings tend to have to be matching! Here's some of the hearts I cut - I started off using my jewellery saw as that's the proper way to do it but, oh, I don't know, it just takes so damned long to do that I changed to using my Xuron shears with no ill-affect on the metal. I cut straight across at the top of the hearts then used my triangle file to file the "v". After filing and sanding the hearts were ready for the next stage. The hearts at the top were going to be enamelled, the larger etched hearts were to be adorned with a silver ball rivet and the smaller one's textured and dapped and stud posts soldered on. There's...

It's a fairly bright day today so I thought I'd catch up on some photographing. I managed to get 5 pairs of earrings done and I've just finished editing them including these raspberry pink enamel hearts. I cut the hearts myself from copper sheet - I don't enjoy sawing metal if I'm honest but I am slowly getting better at it! After filing and sanding the hearts and punching the hanging hole I enamelled the back then enamelled the front with two layer of mauve opaque before adding some transparent raspberry ontop. I love the effect you get with transparents over opaques. Transparent enamels do need to be washed before using them over opaques to help get rid of some of the "bits" that sometimes contaminate the enamel and leave imperfections in the final result. I've become a bit obssessed when I use my washed transparents and always check them to see if there's any black bits, bits of hair or wire wool in them before using them as once they...