Cinnamon Jewellery

The more you do it the easier it gets {unless you play football for England that is.....} That saying is definitely true when it comes to using a jeweller's saw. From really not enjoying cutting metal with a saw and using shears if it was at all possible, I now love using my saw and wielded it almost like a pro {almost} to cut out some cute shapes recently.  I'd downloaded a lot of shape silhouettes from a graphics site that had a 7 day free trial a couple of weeks ago and I chose a frame shape and a five petal flower shape to start with. I resized the shapes in Word then printed them out and stuck them onto the metal. The flower shape was a bit trickier that the frame shape but I got there eventually. I domed the flowers and bezel set a London Blue topaz cabochon in the centre. It's the first time I've used the LB topaz and I must say it is a beautiful sky blue stone. Keeping with the blue theme I set turquoise and sodalite cabochons on the copper ...

I've been meaning to make some copper bangles with ceramic beads for a while now. I bought some pretty pinkish and green ceramic beads a while ago and they've sat in my bead box patiently waiting for their moment of glory. It has now arrived! I decided to photograph how I made the bangles in the hope it will inspire someone/anyone to have a go. It's an easy project and as long as you use ceramic or lampwork beads or anything that has been kiln annealed you should find the beads behave themselves during soldering and don't explode. The most important thing to consider before you start is to make sure your bead hole is big enough for the wire you are going to use. The holes in these pink ceramic beads were a little bit smaller than the 2mm wire I used so I made them bigger using a round needle file. I tried various methods for enlarging the hole - using a drill bit and ball burr with my Dremel but they didn't do a lot so I stuck with using the file. ...

One of my favourite jewellery makers to watch on YouTube is Soham Harrison . His calm manner and straightforward explanations make him very easy to watch. He posts new videos regularly and I caught up with some of them a while ago. One of the videos showed how to make twisted bangles using round wire. I make a lot of bangles in copper and silver so I'm always on the lookout for new ideas and I really liked the look of them. They are very easy to make and basically involve annealing a length of round wire before flattening three sections of it using a rolling mill or hammer. You then anneal the wire again, fix one end into a vice and grip the other end in locking pliers and twist. The whole piece of wire turns creating twists in the flattened sections. You then cut the wire to length and make a bangle as usual. A really simple idea with very pretty results! Here's a few I made...... ...with a single twist. This was my first practice bangle with just one twi...

Photo courtesy of Francesco S on Flickr I thought recently how useful it would be to be able to search a blog to find posts that interest me and apart from the blog archive in the sidebar I didn't know how I could do this. Then I noticed the search box gadget on Blogger. Is this new? I've only just noticed it but knowing my powers of observation it's probably been there for quite a while! So I added it. And was a bit underwhelmed to be honest. It's a search box that works but.........it's grey and just a bit boring. It didn't fit in with my blog either. I like tweaking my blog and enjoy customizing things to make it look a bit more interesting and colourful. So the grey search box didn't stay for long. No, I added a customized version. You can see it up there.  It's quite nice isn't it? I think so anyway and it fits in with the rest of my blog. Here's the code for it courtesy of Tweak Peak . It's fairly simple to do...

I've had another busy week making rings and bangles for orders {which is great} so sometimes it's nice to just play without having to worry about getting things done for a certain time. I was inspired to make something quick and easy so thought I'd make a couple of no-solder rings seen in One Hour Rings by Helen Driggs . I loved the look of them and the fact they are adjustable {to a point}. They consist of a long triangle shaped piece of metal that is formed around a ring mandrel. I wasn't sure how sturdy they would be but after trying them with 20g/0.8mm sheet I would be quite happy to sell them knowing they will keep their shape well. They become work-hardened pretty quickly as you shape them on the mandrel and I did need to anneal them in order to finish shaping them properly. I used a leaf vein texture for the first one which has to be one of my favourite textures. The second ring was textured using masking tape. It was a bit of an experiment and inv...

Meet Tuppence my constant companion who would suction herself to my lap if it was possible. I took this photo in my work shed where, despite deciding the cats were not going to be allowed, she likes to keep me company and it is a bit hard to keep her out when the door is open on a nice day anyway. The baskets were put there until I decide what to do with them {they'll probably be there a while then} but being a cat Tupps had to sit in them. Then she squished herself into a lying position and went to sleep even though it is much too small.......funny girl :D I didn't post last week as I felt a bit off with really bad back ache that I was convinced was sciatica as the pain ran down my left leg too but after admitting defeat and going to the doctors on Friday he thought it was more of a bad posture thing. He showed me some exercises to do and gave me some Tramadol. I've done the exercises several times and they hurt a lot at the moment. It is much better this w...

I received the May 2014 issue of Art Jewelry last week and was immediately drawn to a piece by Michael David Sturlin in the Metalsmith 101 section called Cold Captures: Push-up Prongs. It covers a method of setting stones or buttons or enamel pieces {or anything with a flat base really} using tabs or prongs rather than using a soldered bezel or other setting that needs to be soldered in place. I fancied a change and do love a bit of messing about with metal without doing any soldering so I took the magazine to my jewellery night class and had a go. This is my attempt at the above.....  The millefiore cab was the largest size I possess at the mo as I haven't bought any large cabochons yet {give it time!}. It's about 15mm I think so I used it as a practice piece. I had to draw the shape by hand or rather my scribe as I didn't have anything to use for the curves so it's a bit wonky but I do like the design. I'm not planning on doing anything wi...