Cinnamon Jewellery

This is my new kitten Pixie. She's almost 5 months old now and adorable. After losing two of my three cats over the past couple of years I've been meaning to get another cat for a while but left it over a year before actually getting round to it! I was hoping to get a kitten from the local Cat's Protection place but they deemed where I live to be too near a busy road to be able to have anything other than an adult female indoor cat. They had to Google my address as they admitted they didn't know the area but did seem to know the road in question was "too busy" {it's not}. So knowing an adult female cat probably wouldn't be able to handle my adult male cat Eddie who loves a fight and has bullying tendencies if he senses any weakness in other cats I found a kitten in the local ads. The first photo I took of Pixie in a rare moment of stillness - she looks very serious here - it didn't last long. Pixie came from a stables and she ...

In the last couple of weeks I've been busy making new pieces which was a nice change from made to order bangles which take up most of my time these days! I've had chance to make 12 new sterling silver bangles that needed sending off to London for hallmarking. These are now back, photographed and starting to be listed and appear in my Etsy  shop. I've also been using some more of the texture cards from Rolling Mill Resource  on Etsy. I'm so pleased with how well the new designs work on copper and silver. I sometimes had a problem with getting a good imprint on silver but this latest order are working really well. I also used some twisted copper wire I'd had hanging around for a while to make some open hoop earrings. Sterling silver studs always sell well so I used some small pieces of embossed sheet to create some simple disc studs.  I also made a couple of pairs of silver open hoops too. All my new stuff is already up on my website  and I'...

A while ago I bought a set of diamond coated bead reamers and thought it was about time I tried them out. I got them from Cooksongold  for just under £9 and they arrived in a plastic pouch. There are four bead reamers in the set: two thin round reamers - like a smaller version of a round needle file - and two conical shapes - one with a barrel shaped body.  So, what do you do with a bead reamer? They are designed to be used to enlarge a hole in a bead and can also be used to smooth the area around the hole. Back when I used to make a lot of bead and wire jewellery, every now and then I would come across a couple of stone beads from a string with "wonky" holes. By that I mean when the hole was drilled in the bead it didn't meet properly in the middle causing a narrow area that stopped the wire going through to the other side.  I thought I'd try out the bead reamer on a stone bead with this problem. The 20g copper wire will only go about halfway t...

For someone who's loved silver forever I seem to have an awful lot of scrap 9ct gold! Some of it is from gold chains and a ring I had when I was younger and some of it I was given by my Mum as she wasn't a big gold jewellery person either. She preferred wearing my early bead creations bless her! There's also a couple of scrap pebbles from previous projects. I started by melting it into as large a pebble as I could manage with my torch. I ended up with a slightly saggy looking black lump. As I thought gold wasn't supposed to oxidize I decided to look up exactly what 9ct gold contains and found out it's made up of 37.5% pure gold and the rest is made up of silver, copper and zinc. That's explains the oxidation........ This is the 9ct gold after pickling - still a bit grubby and you can see some of the copper on the surface. I then ran it through the rolling mill, annealing several times as I did so. This is the result. It sta...

Here's an infographic courtesy of Cooksongold that should be very useful to budding solderers! It covers the basics you need to follow to solder succesfully but the most important thing to bear in mind is, like anything, soldering gets easier the more you do it! Copyright © 2016 Cinnamon Jewellery. All rights reserved.