Pretty Pictures

Oh I do love my new camera! I don't think I had realised how basic my old one was until I tried some others. Mind you, the old one did me well. The photos it took in lovely natural light were good, some so good that magazines accepted them for step-by-step projects pictures, but it just couldn't do inside photos.

Anyway, these are some of the earrings I've made this week. I've revived an old design and given it a new twist. The original design had discs made from silver art clay and were flat, but this time I've used discs cut from sterling silver and hammered and domed them. The design is on the inside of the discs and picks up the colour of the beads beautifully. I've used garnet, amethyst and Swarovski crystals so far, and I expect that more variations will follow! I've just added them to the website.

The Lavant show was a good one today, and I've got some more Christmas orders to work on. We're off to a family wedding in Suffolk first thing tomorrow morning, though, so I going to give myself a day or so break!

P.S. Sorry that I'm not replying to comments at the moment - I don't mean to be rude but Blogger won't let me leave comments on anyone's blog at the moment, not even mine! I'm hoping that it'll resolve itself while we're in Suffolk. I do read all the comments though!

Green leaf

Do you remember this from the silversmithing course I went on at Flux'n'Flame? I had originally thought that I would have small beads hanging down the centre of the leaf, but it just didn't look right. I tried a few other ideas too, until finally I came up with this.




So what do you think? I've used peridot, garnet and amethyst, a combination that I really love. And the peridot means that it qualifies for this week's green colour challenge!








As for last week's challenge, sorry this is late but I haven't been good at taking photos this last week or so. The website is looking a bit bare, but by the end of this weekend it'll be stocked up again - assuming that I don't sell everything tomorrow that is! Anyway, this is one of my triple bangles (I love making these) with beautiful rubies - the colour of these lovelies is even better in real life!

Happy Mothering Sunday!

I hope that all of you mothers had a lovely day today! I had a lie-in reading my new chick-lit book and then T and B brought me breakfast in bed, a box of malteasers and a card that B had made for me - bliss! While I was having my lie-in T was teaching B to say 'cheese' when he has his photo taken - above is one of the couple of dozen photos he took! We spent the morning at Longdown Activity Farm feeding the animals and stroking the rabbits and chicks. B loves it there and I've bought a season ticket again this year so we can go whenever we like.

B fell asleep in the car when we were about 5 minutes away from home and I managed to move him into his cot without him waking so I managed to get a couple of hours this afternoon to make up some of the ideas I've had floating around and to catch up with some photos. I made quite a few pairs of hoop earrings but I'm not happy with the photos of them yet, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow for them!

I did manage to photograph some of the silver art clay work I made before I had that horrible cold, so that's what you can see here. The first pendant is my favourite. I did think about oxidising it at first, but I think that the pearls show up better without it. The second pendant and the earrings use the silver art clay pieces that I made on my course with Hilary Bowen. It took me a while to decide how to use them as the idea I had in mind at the course didn't look right when I got home.