Continuing on from last week, since I made several of the Monkey’s Fist knots, I made another pair of earrings!

I’ve been doing some experimenting with photography lately, putting my pieces on a white background instead of the medium gray.  I’m looking for ways to make the images “pop” more – in my recent work I’ve been using a lot of stones that have the same value as the background, and it makes the jewellery look dull.  “Value” in colour terms refers to how light or dark it is.  (To see check the value of your stone, stare at the photo with squinted eyes – if the stone disappears it has the same value as the background.)  In order for a photo to have visual interest, it has to be either lighter or darker than the background, otherwise the eyes see what’s there, but the brain registers “ho hum”.

It’s a bit more work to deal with a white background – inevitably, and even though I have a white balance setting on my camera – the raw photo comes out slightly grey.  Photoshop can adjust the balance it easily, but then I usually still have to do some extra clean up.  It’s a bit tricky to lighten the background enough to get rid of “noise” but not so much that the jewellery bleaches out.

From a print perspective, (putting on my editor hat for a moment), getting photos with white background is a godsend for layout.  I can plunk them down anywhere on a page and build text around them.  Or I can crop and put several images close together – something that isn’t possible when the jewellery is shot on a grey or staged background.   There are no distractions – you look at the jewellery and nothing else.

While they work for print and web, white backgrounds do *not* work well for jury photos.  I had the opportunity to sit in on a jury for a show recently (something I highly recommend BTW, it’s very educational), and I noticed that the photos with white backgrounds were always very jarring.  Backgrounds with a value of medium to dark (but not black) and *absolutely no props* worked best for jury photos.  Prop shots work well for Etsy, but are distracting in jury.

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My life is all about choices:  if I choose to focus on one area of my life, another area gets sacrificed.  For the past few weeks, I’ve had to focus on some group endeavours, and so my work on YOJ projects ground to a halt.  I’m working towards finding balance, but haven’t found it just yet.

For this week’s project, my focus was on making bridal jewellery.  My thoughts were on “something blue” and “tying knots”.

The Monkey’s Fist is a classic macramé knot, usually used as a weight or ornament on the end of a rope.  Tying them in rope is relatively easy.  When I learned it as a child, it was just a matter of sticking a marble between two fingers, and wrapping the rope around the marble and fingers, then around the marble through fingers and then through the loops created by the fingers.  Then the loops were pulled tight.

In wire, the stiffness of the metal, and its tendency to kink makes tying challenging.  There is also the issue of trying to get the proportions right:  thinner gauge wire is more flexible to tie, but the knot becomes very small and fiddly.  I found it impossible to tie wire around a bead without it slipping all over the place.  Pulling the loops tight at the end was also a non-starter, so I had to make the initial wraps as close to round as possible – challenging since without a bead in the centre, the tendency is to wrap ovals.  I ended up creating an invent-a-tool to help.

It took a bit of practice to get consistent results (doesn’t everything?), but I did end up with a satisfying “knot”. To get the “blue” part of the earrings, I decided on adding some pale 2 mm iolites. I would love to try these in a larger gauge of wire, but I think that would really only be possible with fine silver.  Sterling just gets too stiff too fast.

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While having a look at the blog earlier today, I discovered that our interview was posted!  You can read it here.

I’m thrilled to be included with the plethora of talent Tina has featured on the site!  Thanks Tina!

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.

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.