In acknowledgement to my prolonged absence

It has been brought to my attention that I finally need to bite the bullet and turn my jewelry making hobby into an all-out, honest-to-goodness business. The fact that complete strangers keep asking me if I make jewelry to sell was a pretty good clue, really.

"Make a business," you ask? "But you can barely maintain a blog!"

And right you are!

The problem is that I have an inherent fear of accounting (it's a numbers thing... I don't do numbers), and anything remotely related to a decent business plan requires quite a fair bit of taking a long hard look at the numbers and making sure the business is on target to make the profits required to keep the business viable. I should also point out that I do carry a full-time job, which I like pretty well, and there's very little time in my life for a second full-time job.

Q: "What does this mean?"

A: I HAVE NO CLUE. Ideally, following through on the commitment for this blog would be nice. I don't expect to be 'viral,' as it were, nor do I want to deal with the hassles of advertisements and making a profit off of the blog itself. I just want to show people beautiful artisan jewelry, and maybe give a couple tips along the way.

Hopefully I'll be doing more of that in the coming months.

Seafoam lullabies

Hello, 2013, and hello especially to my poor neglected blog. 2012 brought a lot of changes to my life, primarily for the better, and now that the dust is settling I have more time to devote to jewelry again. The above necklace and earring set was the result of about 8 straight hours of labor, start to finish. Materials are chrysoprase, freshwater pearls, dyed coral, and an assortment of findings ranging from silvertone who-knows-what to actual sterling silver, with 49-strand wire and clear stretchy cord as the stringing material.

What I love about this necklace, in terms of functionality, is that the bottom four strands are detachable, leaving a single-strand choker and a lot of options in terms of style and complexity. 

Design-wise, I like the seafoam color of the chrysoprase and knew that I wanted pearls to accent the oceangoing feel of the piece. The coral was something of an afterthought, since I ran across it while digging through my boxes of jewelry supplies for the stuff I actually wanted (part of the 2012 adventure was moving ten hours away from my previous place of residence, and a shameful amount of my stuff is still in boxes).

I'm always a great fan of using up stuff in my stash, especially since the coral was part of a grab-bag I got some time ago. I also don't usually go for pink, but it complements the green chrysoprase so well and I wanted the stuff gone!

Getting the strands to sit right was the biggest challenge I faced with this piece, since I'm usually really bad at anticipating how different lengths will play with the other strands. The chunkiness of this necklace works in my favor on this one! I could have made the earrings symmetrical... but what's the fun in that? I wanted this piece to be playful, and few things say "playful" more than mismatched earrings. It definitely dresses down what could be an overpowering necklace.

I think this is a great start to 2013!

Colorful elegance

I picked up these pieces of quartz at a gem and jewelry show in Columbus, OH almost a year ago, and these pretty crystals have sat on the back burner for far too long. I'm quite addicted to the color combination of purple and copper, and felt that there was enough color contrast in the quartz to exploit the beauty of these crystals in a combination of copper beads and lilac pearls that have also been sitting in my bead organizer for *cough mutter cough* years now.

The loose initial concept I had in mind was to make a choker-length necklace with the large crystal as the focal of the choker and the smaller two crystals reserved for matching earrings.

The thing with loose initial concepts is that, like battle plans, they get blown to pieces at first contact with the enemy. Once I had wire wrapped the main crystal and began stringing beads, it became evident that the crystal was going to stand out a little too much to my liking and I decided that adding the smaller crystals would be the ideal way to pull the focal back into the necklace, in addition to adding the copper drop with loops to add pearls to the focal in an effort to unify the continuity of the color scheme.

Here's the fun part: In order to get the drop to hang where I wanted it to on the focal, I had to add copper beads... but the wire was already obviously wrapped in place. My solution was to take some leftover copper crimp covers and bend them around the wire. Instant bead!

What I like best about this necklace is that the composition of the focal allows for a reversible necklace. The difference is subtle, but having the option of having the drop pendant either hang in front or back of the main focal crystal means that I get to display both sides of this interesting crystal, because there are textural differences between the two sides and in this case I feel that both sides of the crystal are the "good" side.

As far as difficulty goes, this wasn't a hard necklace for me to put together and I only spent about four hours on it from start to finish. The tricky part was wire wrapping the crystals so that they were aesthetically pleasing yet securely held, and I think I was fairly lucky to get it all right on the first go. The trick with wire wrapping is to proceed slowly and get a feel for what the wire wants to do. This was a thicker wire, which meant more pressure to get it to meld to the form of the crystal. It was a balancing act between applying force to the wire but not so much force that I damaged the crystal, so I didn't actually use any tools to help me manipulate the wire until I got to the stage where I was ready to add loops to the ends for stringing.

Overall, I'm really quite thrilled with how this necklace turned out and if I got the opportunity to go back and revisit this necklace, I would consider adding a second, smaller wire to do some more detailed, decorative wrapping around the focal, and I would try to shorten the length a little. This is a necklace that should go with either a high-neckline shirt like a turtleneck, or a shirt with a lower neckline that clears the length of the necklace. It really doesn't lay right if it has to fall over a collar, so it does limit how many outfits I can wear it with. Otherwise, consider me happy!

More adventures in metalsmithing

What: Ring
Materials: Silver, copper, brass, hematite cabochon

Like the Ouroboros bracelet, this is a project from the metalsmithing course I took in college. This was our first major project, and the assignment was to design a ring. We had to have a cabochon and I think we also had to choose more than one metal to make the ring out of. The design is fun, but as far as practicality is concerned the ring is too tall to be used on my fingers, at least. It was made to be a thumb ring, and the height of the ring does constrict the mobility of my thumb's knuckle. This didn't count against the final score, since nothing was said about it having to be a wearable ring, but I was hoping for a little bit of functionality.

As far as motivation and artistic choices are concerned, I knew going into the project that I wanted to use three metals. I've always liked the look of stacked rings, but I wanted to play around with having infrastructure between the stacked rings. In retrospect, I would have played on that idea more in the design process, but I'm okay with the ring as it is because of its simplicity. I chose hematite as the central cabochon to tie the piece together because of its metallic luster and sharp contrast to the other three elements, as opposed to other metallic stones such as pyrite. I'm certainly a fan of pyrite, but the color would have been too similar to the brass and would have thrown off the balance of the piece, which I did want to maintain. Onyx was an option, but again, I liked the theme of metallics and wanted that unification to continue into the stone.

Truth be told, I'm not sure I ever actually named this piece. Not that every piece of jewelry needs to have a name or title, I just suppose that as my very first metalsmithing venture I should have been a bit more commemorative in its naming. I've had this ring for almost three years now, though, so it seems pointless to name it now. There will be more rings for me to name in the future!

Other Uses for Clothesline

What it is: Choker-length necklace with matching earrings

Materials used: Copper wire and findings, Swarovski bicones, 12mm cubic zirconia drops, focal component, clothesline

Process: Lots and lots of wire-wrapping. I started by cutting lengths of clothesline (with heavy-duty wire cutters, don't try to use good jewelry cutters for this!) to the length I wanted the necklace to be, then wire-wrapped the ends individually and connected them using a handmade toggle-style clasp. (Hint: I tightly pinched the first couple coils so that they would grip the cord securely) Once that was in place, I wire-wrapped the main focal component into place, continuing the wire-wrapping halfway up the length of the necklace and ending in coils. Off of the main wire-wrapping I attached one of the cubic zirconia drops to create an asymmetrical feel to the piece (Actually, I just had some cubic zirconia drops leftover from another project that were begging to be used and I felt like this was a great place to throw them in, but shhhhh! I planned it this way all along!). I then wire-wrapped the top half of the necklace in a couple of places to lash the clothesline together so excess movement wouldn't distort the wire-wrapping towards the bottom. With that done, I took a smaller gauge of copper wire and that's when I added the Swarovski crystals, wire-wrapping the small gauge around the larger gauge and threading crystals as I went along to give the piece some extra sparkle. I went through a similar process for the earrings.

Revvin' up the WABAC machine!

In the interest of doing things with my life like updating this blog, I think I'm going to cheat a little and post a couple pictures of old projects while I get around to photographing more recent jewelry adventures. The subject of this photo is titled "Ourobouros" from the mythological serpent consuming its own tail signifying infinity. It was designed to be worn as a bangle bracelet, but it works better as an arm cuff. It's made entirely of copper with a liver of sulfur patina, and it was created during a semester of jewelry making and metalsmithing taught by a graduate assistant at the university I attended. I wish I could give more detail about the construction, but I'm not sure I could do better than "texturing, sawing, hammering, soldering, anticlastic raising, more hammering, swearing, more soldering, more swearing, patina, polish, finally get some sleep before the class presentation."

*Note: "WABAC" is indeed pronounced "wayback," and if you recognize that particular acronym, you've watched entirely too much Rocky and Bullwinkle.

**Extra note: This photo was not photographed by me, but rather by the university photographer that frequently photographs student artwork for the department's use. The bracelet, however, is my design and construction.

Steampunk heart!

Materials used: Old wristwatch gears and parts, Kato Polyclay, jump rings, hinge, large fabricated gear.

Process: After conditioning copper and silver Kato Polyclay, I combined the two colors and repeatedly rolled out the blend until I got an arrangement that looked like old scrap metal with enough variation to be visually appealing. I hand-formed the heart shape, then sliced the heart in half in order to press in the gear to be used for attaching the finished heart to a cord or necklace. I also added other embellishments at that point in time (the jumprings and the spiky end of watch crowns). After reattaching the heart and smoothing out the seam, I then sliced out the front right quarter of the heart using an X-Acto knife. I hollowed out the main body of the heart as well as the inside of the quarter heart to make room for gears. Texture was added using carving tools, and the gears were pressed into the clay. I attached the hinge to the body of the heart and baked the two pieces separately. I baked the clay on foil and tissue in my toaster oven according to Kato Polyclay's directions, then once the heart pieces cooled I marked out the drill holes for the hinge to be attached to the quarter heart, pre-drilled the holes, then attached the hinge using the screws that were packaged with the hinge (I did have to trim the tips of the screws to prevent them from poking through the clay).

Notes:
This was my first time working with Kato Polyclay (or any other polymer clay brand, such as Sculpey or Fimo), so I'm thrilled with the overall success of the piece (i.e. I didn't burn it to an awful-smelling crisp, though the piece did do some ominous smoking and emanated an unpleasant odor during the first several minutes of baking). The edges did do some minor cracking where I tried to blend the seam, but it's held up well so far after at least one drop onto parking lot pavement. Overall, I think I'll continue to use Kato Polyclay for now. If I ever give Fimo or Sculpey a try, I'll post the results here!

The photograph is of the incomplete piece before I attached the quarter heart to the hinge.