I’m also available for teaching private classes and groups of all ages.  Please email me for details!

It’s been another productive week here in the studio, with two new ring designs (destined for tutorials), some bridal jewelry and this pair of earrings made.

The earrings are the product of some work I’ve been doing on a proposal for a one-day course.  The idea is to teach ancient techniques.  This pattern is assumed to be ancient Egyptian.  It was all but lost to time before being reintroduced in the 1840s by the House of Castellani.   The Castellanis were greatly influenced by jewelry found in excavations of ancient Etruscan sites.  As fervent nationalists, they studied the pieces coming out of the sites, and painstakingly reproduced the jewelry, in what became known as the Italian Archeological Style.  The Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome has in its collection a “Prehistoric” bracelet, manufactured by Castellani, which today’s wire artists would recognize as a variant of the Egyptian scroll.

The Etruscans had trading relationships with the Syrians, Phoenicians and Greeks, who all traded with the Egyptians, so it’s conceivable that the design traveled from the Nile Basin to Ancient Italy.

Registration for my classes at Haliburton School of the Arts is now open!

I’m very excited to be heading back for my third year teaching at Haliburton!  I will be teaching two classes, Wire Jewellery I (August 2-6, 2010) and Wire Jewellery II (August 9-13, 2010).

The school is nestled in the heart of Ontario’s Cottage Country near the shores of Head Lake.  Come for a peaceful and relaxing week, and have fun making jewellery!

See my classes page for course descriptions and a link to register!

Ocean Jasper Pendant (2010)
Sterling silver, fine silver, ocean jasper
Constructed, cold-joined
L 5.4 cm x W 3.0

I’m in production mode, building up some stock, and that means digging through my stash of stones.  I came across this ocean jasper, which I bought last year from a fellow member of the International Guild of Wire Jewelry Artists.

I’m not normally an ocean jasper fan, but every time I look at this cab, I see celestial clouds and galaxies.  It draws me in, and I can imagine that I’m looking into the vastness of outer space. This is a really special stone.

Generally, my preference when setting is to leave as much of the surface exposed as possible. I also tend to favour the more substantial, heavier bezels achieved by doing binding wrapping all around the stone.  It would have been easiest with a straight prong setting, but I wanted to add the beads to create some visual interest.  They are structural in that they act almost like prongs, holding the stone, but they also add beautiful decoration.

Corners are challenging to get tight, and I’m happy to have managed a secure fit around these.  I don’t have a lot of experience setting stones with points – most of the time the stones I deal with are round, oval or teardrop shaped.

I’m undecided if I should hang this on a viking knit chain, or on a strand of ocean jasper beads. Thoughts anyone?

All in all, I’m very pleased with how this turned out.  Even my husband, who has a decided bias towards using a torch, likes the setting – very high praise indeed!

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I was sitting at my computer on Tuesday night, minding my own business,  when inspiration struck!  It was one of those “bolt out of the blue” ideas that forced me to get up right then, get my pliers & wire and start bending.

*Contented sigh*

I love it when that happens.

This design fulfills a long-standing desire of mine to create a pair of earrings with interchangeable bits.  The pearl drops can be removed and replaced by other drops, or can be left off altogether.  The result is a very versatile earring that can be worn with everything – from dressy to casual.

The sleek styling makes this an elegant earring for a wedding:  With the pearl, it can be worn by the bride, or without, by her bridesmaids.

These earrings are available from my Etsy Shop.

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It’s ring week here at the studio!

For a long time, I’ve been wanting to develop an original method for constructing a single bead ring, so this week I spent some time playing around with a couple of ideas.  The one I teach in my course at George Brown College is Mavis Llewellyn’s One Bead Ring (published in The Wire Artist Jeweller, September 1999).  According to her daughter Susan, Mavis developed the design back in the late 70s-early 80s as a quick-to-make-project to sell at shows.

Other single bead ring patterns are easier to make (i.e. 3-minute ring), but the shanks (to my eye) are sloppy looking.  In square wire, they often look tortured. If you’re looking for something quick and dirty to sell for $8 and you work “organically”, then Bob’s Your Uncle…

The thing I like most about Mavis’ design is how elegant it looks, especially the shank.  The ones I produced this week haven’t achieved anything resembling elegance or consistency yet, but I’m happy to have made progress.

I mentioned in my Week 6 post that I was making felted beads, and now I can share the results of that effort.  Initially I was going to pair the felted beads with the crochet beads just as I’d made them, in fine silver white.  Then it occurred to me that over time, the silver is going to tarnish, and the necklace will be difficult to clean without taking it apart.

The solution was to add LOS to the silver.

Liver of sulphur stinks to high heaven, but it creates such interesting effects, especially when a bit of salt is added into the solution!  I love how the colours change, and in this case, how they became mottled in the purple-blue range.

A friend of mine asked me to produce a bunch of pieces for her to use in the fall for a fashion show, so this is going to be one of the things I send her.  It’s not my typical style, but it will work well with the clothing being shown.

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I love the quartz family of stones.  They’re durable and affordable, which makes them great for everyday jewellery. They come in a wide variety of colours, which makes them really versatile.

Since I’m still trying to catch up, I decided to go rummaging through my components box and pull together some bits to make this pair of earrings.  Earlier in the year I took apart a bunch of old jewellery that hadn’t sold.  I saved the pieces, because they were well made, and, quite frankly, if I can save a few minutes by using a recycled pair of earwires rather than making up new ones, why not?

Anyways, the celtic spiral I used here was once part of a bracelet.  Now they make a nice pair of earrings.

The other day, while commiserating with my friend Margaret about our work loads and not seeming to be able to stop to catch a breath, she quoted back to me a comment that I’d deadpanned into one of our conversations once:

“Breathing is just sooo overrated…”

This week, I told her that I think that would make a perfect epitaph for my headstone.  That laid both of us flat with laughter.

I shouldn’t complain, because it’s self-inflicted:  I’ve taken on too many projects to try to deal with at once.  As a result, I’m struggling to do anything as effectively as I’d like.  My DH is currently working a rotating shift schedule, 4 – 12 hour days then 4 – 12 nights, which is also wreaking havoc on my regular routine.

As a result, I’m off the rails on the YOJ project.  I so want to be producing quality work, but I seem to only have time for the barest minimum, and even that seems mediocre!

In an effort to catch up, I’m going to just put together a couple of very quick pieces.  I found these little crochet balls while cleaning up the studio a week or two ago.  I made them several years ago, but the project they were intended for didn’t really work out.  I applied LOS to some of the balls, and they are being used in the project that will be posted next.  These two were left over, so I put them together to make a little pendant.

Beaducation has made a bunch of its videos available for free, and last week, while I was pondering my next YOJ project, I watched the felted bead video to refresh my memory on how to do it.  I’ve now made 3 1/2 dozen beads of inconsistent size and nearly rubbed off the skin on my palms… LOL

Felted bead-making is one of those processes that allows your mind to wander, and so I was thinking about the Marquise Series and where I could go next with it.  In the video, Gail Crosman Moore talks about making a lozenge-shaped bead, and it occurred to me that I could combine those beads with marquise elements.  So I spent the next couple of hours constructing various types of marquise elements I thought could work.  Rather than string the elements from point to point, I wanted to turn them on their sides.

What I’ve ended up with initially is a step pendant.  This design needs a bit of tweaking, because the wire looks very light weight.  In its present form, this element will be overwhelmed if combined with felted lozenges.

I have an idea on how to deal with this issue, and that will be the next project.  I’m glad to have broken through the creative block I had a couple of weeks ago though…

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