Cinnamon Jewellery

I've seen plenty of coin rings for sale online and thought I'd have a go at making one. The first thing I needed to do was find some suitable coins. I'd seen some really pretty examples of rings made with coins that have a decorative border around the edge on the front of the coin so I trawled ebay looking for some like this. I found quite a few and decided to buy a couple of cheap coins I'd use to practice with before buying anything too expensive. I found these... A bronze 20 Reis coin from Portugal, a 2 Franc Swiss coin made of nickel silver and a rather lovely silver one Rupee coin from India. I decided to try out the Portuguese bronze coin first. First I annealed the coin to soften the metal. I needed a hole in the coin so I used dividers to draw a circle in the centre of the coin. The dividers slipped a couple of times but any scratches would disappear once I started stretching the coin so I didn't worry too much about them. ...

The need to make cute, brightly coloured enamel studs propelled me into the world of combining soldering with enamel a couple of years ago. I knew from reading up on it that it was possible to enamel and solder on the same piece but wasn't too confident I was able to do it back then. It was a slightly embarrassing occurance that made me just get on with - I'd made some enamel studs with glued on stud posts. I'd used 2 part epoxy resin which was a job in itself as it set hard after 5 minutes so I had to keep mixing more up. The finished studs looked ok but that little voice in my head kept asking "are you sure you want to use glue?" I wasn't but didn't think I had any other way to do it so I used glue. I sold my first pair and merrily sent them on their way to Canada. A couple of week later the buyer got in touch to say the stud post had come off one of the earrings and the other was hanging off. I was mortified, apologized profusely and refunded her m...