Cinnamon Jewellery

A couple of months ago I received an email from Liv at the  Wildfowl and Wetland Centre at Arundel in West Sussex which is about an hour's drive from me, asking me if would be interested in a wholesale order for the gift shop at the centre. After setting up a meeting where I took some of my jewellery to show the manager, Liv and another member of staff and agreeing terms, I waited to hear if the Wetland Centre's head office would agree to them placing an order. They did and a few weeks later I received an order for 40 pieces! Fantastic, I thought, I can do that! I've just started a new job but hell, I can do that! It took about 2 weeks altogether as most of the pieces are oxidised plus making all the earwires and oxidising and cleaning those up too but I did it. I did take some stock from my Folksy shop  to save time and experimented with using a radial disc polisher on my Dremel to clean up some of the oxidised pieces (it worked and saved a lot of ...

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...

Charlie my cat that is with his strange rubber fetish............. He likes to rub against the rubber mallet I use to whack bits of metal with whenever he gets the chance. He also loves the smell of bleach. Funny boy  : )

The Oct/Nov issue of Bead magazine (out 21st September) features two of my projects! The theme was "autumn" so I thought antique copper, greens and oranges would fit the bill and came up with a pair of hoop-style wirework earrings with swarovski crystal elements beads in olivine and crystal copper. The earrings are finished with a pair of handmade hoop earwires. The second project shows how to make the hoop earwires plus another pair of simple earwires. I also made a sterling silver version with amethyst beads  The vintage edition looks to be pretty interesting!

That's how I'd describe my mood concerning my blog recently. Not because I don't enjoy writing stuff - I do, it's just "other things" have been on my mind. I started a part-time home carer job recently after 18 months of working as a private carer doing a few hours a day so working for a company again feels a bit weird. There've been a few starting hiccups - not knowing when I would get my days off, cocking up my worksheet then expecting me to work 7 days a week without any notice (er, no!) and the inevitable Saturday night " can you help us out, someone's gone off sick " phone calls. After previously working for another care company for five years sometimes doing 15 hour days without a proper break I vowed when I left never to work nights again so the answer to those phone calls is a definite no! I work mornings and that's it :D I am enjoying the work though and the people I go to are lovely. On the jewellery front (much better ...

I posted recently about experimenting with fold forming and enamelling - creating a definite division in the surface of the metal then enamelling both sides a different colour as seen in these disc earrings below Well I've been playing around with the idea again and made two more pairs this time leaving one side of the fold bare copper. I used transparent enamels over opaque - you can achieve some lovely colours that way.  A bit fiddly but that's all part of the fun :D Raspberry transparent over ivory Turquoise transparent over lichen green with a sprinkle of seafoam

I love browsing YouTube for tutorials on jewellery making techniques. At the moment it's soldering and in my search for helpful videos to watch I've come across some stinkers - you know the one's I mean where you can't see what the person is doing because their hands are in the way, or it's just a series of photos advertising their jewellery or the one's where they don't speak and just play some weird music instead........... So I was really happy to find a series of videos (30) from Nancy LT Hamilton , a US jewellery maker, that are a joy to watch. You can see and hear her clearly, she knows what she's talking about and she's funny too. Plus she has a workroom to die for! Nancy covers subjects including all about solder, fancy rivets, how to saw, annealing metal, how to make a ring plus some handy tips. So if you're a budding metal worker who's dying to know how to create a flush rivet or how to make your own fancy twisted wire I'd...