Primrose Hill

It's been a while since I made a pair of earrings for the AJE earring challenge but as it was my turn to write the reveal post over on the AJE blog last Sunday I thought that it was about time I sorted myself out! It's not that I don't make earrings, it's just that most of them are from my Golden Collection so they don't fit in the challenge.

I'm really pleased with this pair of earrings. Yellow is definitely not a colour I work with much - ok, let's me honest here - it's a colour that I usually avoid! But something made me add a string of dusky yellow faceted glass beads to my shopping basket on Etsy ages ago, and seeing a friend's lovely yellow cardigan worn over a grey t-shirt encouraged me to actually use them! So here you are...

Primrose Hill - Soft primose yellow, subtle grey and silver with a delicate texture all add up to a dainty pair of earrings that quickly become your favourites to wear with jeans and a tshirt or a summer dress. Perfect for adding a lovely touch of colour. Picasso Jasper, faceted yellow glass beads and sterling silver.

AJE earrings challenge reveal

It's my turn to write the AJE post for the earrings challenge reveal, so I thought that I ought to get my own reveal post up on time for once!

I've continued on my poppy and wood them. Afterall, I make so many poppy head pins, charms and earwires for my Daisychain Extra shop that I should make more use of them in my own designs! And I bought some beautiful wooden beads from Smitten Beads in the New Year, and I'm really enjoying showing them off in earrings.

Ebony and Silver use a pair of hollow silver beads that I made as a demonstration for one of my college classes. I've given them a lovely matt finish and teamed them with long ebony twisted beads - hanging from poppy earwires of course!

Out of the Blue has Czech glass turquoise faceted beads and ebony rondelles strung on poppy headpins that I've turned into earwires.

I've kept to a turquoise/aqua theme for the earrings I chose from the AJE Earring Challenge Pinterest board - click here to see!

AJE earrings challenge - reveal 4

One week I will actually publish a blog post on time for the Art Jewelry Elements earrings challenge reveal! I'm quite pleased with myself that I have made a pair of earrings for each week, even if I did get a bit behind with taking photos of them while I was setting up my new photography lights. I find earrings the hardest type of jewellery to make - they have fewer components in them than bracelets or earrings, so for me everything in them has to be perfectly balanced, and there's no room for error.

Top: Tropical Flowers, Bottom: Tropics

This week's offerings have a tropical colour scheme - partly because I want to see far more of the sun that we have started to see a bit this week, and partly because I just love the combination of brown, turquoise and deep red! Both pairs of earrings are waiting for new homes on the website here.

I'm really pleased with the earwires on the second pair. A lovely friend came round last Thursday evening so that I could show her how to make silver earwires to compliment her beautiful polymer clay beads. Joanna and I spent a fun couple of hours in the workshed melting wire into headpins, turning loops, twisting wire, and these are the earrings she made....

Aren't they beautiful? I love Joanna's beads, especially the hollow beads that she makes. And remember when you look at these that she hadn't made a single earwire before! You can see more of Joanna's work here.

Lights, camera, earrings! (oh, and snow!)

My mission to get more organised has continued this week in between teaching and making lots of clasps. Remember the new photo set up I showed you here? I have finally, after five years or so, bought some new, proper photography lights and umbrellas to throw lovely diffused light on my jewellery. They arrived on Wednesday but I only got round to opening them this afternoon - we had a snow day today so while the boys were relaxing after a morning playing in the snow I went and played in the workshed!

It's going to take me a while to get really happy with the photos I take with the new lights - I only got the chance to play for an hour or so - but I'm pleased so far. I took some quick photos of a couple of pairs of earrings I've made for the Art Jewelry Elements Earrings Challenge, and they are definitely a lot better than the ones I took last week, but I want to find a few more props to show off the jewellery better on my new background as I don't think the lovely wooden box that I've used for a few years now goes that well with the lighter backdrop. I'll get there! Both pairs of earrings are now available on my Daisychain Jewellery etsy shop, and I've pinned them to the AJE Earrings Challenge Pinterest board too. If you haven't had a chance to go and look at the Pinterest board yet please do so - there are some really beautiful entries so far!

Getting organised

That's what I feel I've been doing this week! I'm teaching quite a bit this month, both privately at home (including tomorrow!) and at college, so I've been sorting out the workshed after the pre-Christmas, making lots of last minute orders, rush. It definitely needed a good tidy, but I've also taken the opportunity to do a couple of jobs that I've wanted to do for a while, including putting together a new photography set up.
 

Not the most exciting photo I've ever shown you!

 For the last few years I've been using a table top photo tent that I wrote about here. I've been wanting to change it for a while though as it's not big enough to take decent photos of long necklaces, and the backgrounds I've made for it get creased really easily. Putting up the new roller blinds in the window of the workshed gave me the idea of using one to take photos on, and I finally got it set up this week. It's not really anything fancy, I've just fixed the blind to the wall above the table, but it draps really well, it's not going to get creased (I hope!), I can roll it up out of the way when I need to and I love the texture of the material. I still need to perfect the lighting for it though as the lights I've been using seem a bit dark for it. I can turn up the exposure on my camera to compensate for that, but as I hold my camera rather than use a tripod so that I can get the angles I prefer turning up the exposure can result in some rather shaky photos!

Blackberry Earrings

 The first piece of jewellery I took photos of using it was the pair of earrings above. They're my first pair of earrings for the Art Jewelry Elements Earrings Challenge - we're challenging you to create a pair of earrings a week during 2013, making sure that each pair includes art beads or art components. The challenge is broken down into 13 week sections, so you can just do part of the year if you wish. You can find the full details of the challenge here, and if you'd like to see how I made these earrings head over to the AJE blog for a step-by-step tutorial. And if you really like the earrings you can find them here!