Cinnamon Jewellery

I posted recently about some enamel earrings I made recently and how I was going to make some more small enamelled stud earrings. My first attempt at them a while ago was a bit fraught as it involved using enamel solder and enamelling the back over the soldered on post. I hadn't done much soldering at that point so was a bit, well, scared really! It worked ok then and it worked ok a few days ago when I made the little group above. I thought I'd take a family portrait before they were separated! Pea green topped with lichen and robin's egg blue  I could make life easy for myself and just enamel the front like a lot of the enamelled studs you see on Etsy, I could but then I'd be waiting for the cracks to appear in the enamel which they have a habit of doing on thin gauges of metal without any counter enamel. I know this because I tried it :D They are "easy" to do really, just a bit fiddly with being pretty small at 7.5mm. The orang...

Another of the many, many things on my to-do list is to make some etched copper findings to add to my shops. I made a start a couple of weeks ago with these pre-cut copper "diamonds" - I call them diamonds as I never know quite how to describe them - squares on the diagonal maybe.... Anyway sold in pairs they'd be great to add to earrings or with another hole at the opposite point they could be used as links. Oxidized. Of course. I also made some small etched 9mm discs with hanging hole. They would be perfect to add to the ends of earrings or onto bracelets or necklaces to create some movement as charms. They could go just about anywhere you can hang things! Sold in packs of 6.

I've been concentrating on bezel setting and soldering a lot recently so have been working mainly with metals of the silver and copper hue. So a bit like when your body tells you you need chocolate (all the time in my case) I got out the enamels recently to feed my craving for colour. Enamels used to scare me when I first started using them and I was ultra careful about not contaminating them so as not to discover those little black specks and tiny pieces of wire wool that you never see until after you've fired something. I'm still careful but maybe a bit more relaxed these days. I recently had a problem with some transparent enamel I'd washed several months ago. I used it over opaque and it cracked. Not straight away because enamel likes to lull you into a false sense of security sometimes. No, one piece cracked a few hours after it was fired and the other a couple of days after. I reckoned it was because the washed enamel had been hanging around for a while and...

I'm really enjoying creating jewellery for me for a change! Despite making jewellery to sell I very rarely set something aside just for myself. Why? I have no idea other than the uncontrollable urge I have to keep making new pieces to add to my shops. In fact I feel a tiny bit guilty spending time making jewellery for myself which is utter madness I know. So to make up for this I've been making pieces at my jewellery course at night school that really are just for me and it makes me feel very extravagant {although I think that's more to do with the cost of silver to be honest!} As I make mostly earrings to sell and not really being a pendant type of person (I should be I know) the last two projects I did at college were rings. The latest is an etched silver and carnelian combination which morphed into being like a lot of my stuff does. It was originally going to lie lengthways along my finger than I realized it looked better going across. The shape changed seve...

One thing that has always caught my eye when I look at metalwork jewellery is contrast and layers. That difference in texture between patterned and smooth and also the depth added by layers and overlaying. I recently tried etching sterling silver firstly using copper nitrate and a battery. It worked but the results were unpredictable. By that I mean some pieces etched well within an hour and the next batch were hardly touched after 4 hours. A bit frustrating and not reliable enough for someone who isn't the world's most patient soul! So I decided to try ferric nitrate which is a bit more "hardcore" than the previous method and one I'd been hoping to avoid. The sterling silver etched well with the ferric nitrate. I used vinyl/plastic stickers you can find in craft stores and left it for about 2.5 hours. The stickers worked well and the etch was really clean and quite deep.  These earrings were hard to photograph because of their shiny shiny nat...

Look out for issue 45 of Bead magazine which was out on 13 March. Bead has a new look this issue and is full of Spring inspiration! There's quite a lot of floral action going on including a step-by-step project for my copper wirework earrings with ceramic flower beads.  I love those beads!  Seeing the photos has reminded me to dig out the rest of those ceramic flower beads and do something else with them. I bought a mix of colours including lilac, pink and yellow. I'd like to thread them onto copper or silver hoops then solder the hoops closed. I "think" the ceramic beads will stand up to the heat of the torch ok. Some strategically placed pliers would act as a heat sink and easy solder would make it a quick in and out job so I may well have a go soon. Here's the colourful front cover of Bead magazine - it's so bright you can't help but be cheered up by it :D

 I decided recently that etching is one of my favourite things to do with metal. I read about it online quite a while ago and immediately thought it looked cool but the thought of using an "acid" and having to find somewhere to store it (a perennial problem when you don't have a workroom) put me off. So instead I admired etched copper from afar. Until I got a bee in my bonnet about it again and bought Lexi Erikson's copper etching dvd. Lexi Erikson is very good at explaining jewellery techniques and making them seem much more straightforward than they first appear. I already knew that ferric chloride was a salt and not an acid so wouldn't eat my flesh through to the bone if I accidently spilled some on my hand. The dvd made me feel much more comfortable about having a go so I ordered some ferric chloride from ebay and bought some stamps and StazOn ink from a local craft shop. My first attempt went ok but for some reason I left the copper to etch for an hou...