I’ve been very busy of late, not only creating new stock for existing and new stockists, but also coming up with some new products too. I’ve been working with my sea glass collection of late. I’ve got draws and boxes overflowing with the sea glass I pick up on the beach every day that it was about time I started making jewellery with it.
Last year I made a few pieces for craft fairs and the earrings I made sold quite well. Here is an image I took recently of a simple pair:
Holes were drilled into two pieces of glass that I managed to pair up. I then used a thin gauge of silver wire to wire wrap them and then attached them to a pair of my hand crafted silver earwires. I need to make some more of these, but I might get an even thinner gauge of wire and do a bit of chaos wrapping around the top in order to cover the holes up. Is chaos wrapping an actual term? I don’t know where I came up with it – maybe I read it somewhere on someone”s blog or site, but it might just be a name I came up with – not sure.
This is a pendant I made for Colin’s sister for Christmas – crap pic as I was in the middle of packing for my holiday and wrapping presents at the time when I realised I should take a photo of the pendant before I wrapped it up. The shape of the silver was inspired by coral I picked up and collected on the beaches in the Outer Hebrides. I want to make more of these but again I think they might look better with a bit of chaos wrapping to cover the holes.
I love the fact that each pendant would be unique due to the fact that no piece of sea glass can ever be the same as another and also the shaped silver would be handcrafted each time and not cast. I suppose if I wanted to create a huge amount of these I would get a mould made so that I could cast the coral shape over and over again to speed up the production process.
Need to look into casting and find out more as I don’t know much about it to be honest.
I’ve also been learning how to ball silver wire as I wanted to create a set of pendants that would hold pieces of sea glass within a claw of some kind. After lots of experiments I came up with this:
But as you can see, I all the balled silver ends are really rough. I didn’t bother to file them smooth as I thought it would take far too long and I would probably have to sand the balls down completely. See this pendant as an example of that – it kind of defeats the object of balling the wire in the first place.
Then, after watching a few YouTube videos about balling wire I noticed that people were heating the wire using the hottest part of the flame and then when the wire started balling, instead of removing it straight from the flame like I was doing, they moved the wire into the cooler part of the flame and then removed it from the heat. I tried this and it worked an absolute treat.
Totally chuffed that I’ve mastered this technique at last.
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On a separate note, I’ve also been making lots of spoon rings for my own shop and for my stockists. Here are six that have been completed:
but I’ve got lots more on the go and will post some images up soon. I’ve been collecting spoons for a while now and have quote a lot now – I just can’t resist a bargain when I see one, or better still, beating other eBayers with higher bids to win my prize.
When we visited Colin’s sister over Christmas she took us to Horncastle where I discovered spoon heaven! So many antique shops and junk shops and the last one we went to had a huge stack of cases full of cutlery sets – I could’ve spent all day there as well as a huge fortune. I managed to restrain my spending though and only purchased a few sets of really special ones with amazing patterns. Can’t wait to get them all finished and completed.
I also came home with loads of old music, maps and kids annuals and can’t wait to make a new load of envelopes – so watch out for those soon too.
