Christmas in November!

It's that time of year - the Christmas craft shows are nearly here and I'm busy creating new pieces to go on  my stalls. I've got two more stalls this year, one in Southampton in just over a couple of week's time and one in Winchester the next day - and then I think I'll give myself at least the morning off the next day!! I'm really excited about both events, but for different reasons.


The first show is the first one that I've ever had a hand in organising. At the beginning of the year I suggest to a couple of friends who also have their own small businesses in the area that it would be great if we could get together for a shopping evening before this Christmas, either at one of our homes or in one of the local church halls. We've finally put our plans into action - introducing our first every Christmas Shopping Evening on Friday 12th November, 7.30pm-9.30pm!

The venue is the Old Chemist, a beautiful old shop in Bitterne Park that's now a church office for the local evangelical church and a small community centre, and we've got seven different stalls, from gorgeous handbags, great traditional wooden toys, Pampered Chef, Vie at Home cosmetics, Phoenix cards, and, of course, my jewellery! The evening is also raising money for the Wessex Cancer Trust, who do a amazing amount of work helping cancer patients and their families in the South of England - more information about the evening can be found here! We're selling tickets in advance, with money going to the Wessex Cancer Trust, and the tickets include a glass of wine, mince pies and a raffle ticket. There will also be tickets available on the door.

The event the next day is the Christmas Winchester Handm@de show at the Winchester Guildhall on Saturday 13th November from 11am - 5pm. This is the third Winchester Handm@de show, and the first Christmas one that we've had. The first two shows were a great success, with beautifully unique handcrafted goods - some of which you can see here!

Maths

Pregnancy + catching the horrible cold that's been doing the rounds for the last couple of weeks = not being able to take any medication + sleeping even less well than usual

all of the above = very grouchy Jo (sorry family!)

thankfully fantastic family = Mum and Dad helping out with B for a couple of days while T has to work and I can try and fight the bug off!

Normal service should be resumed soon!

Stones!

Another waffly post from me today, I'm afraid, as I can't seem to settle my mind on any one thing at the moment! I think it's partly because it's a Wednesday morning and on Tuesday evenings I teach two college classes and don't get home until about 10.30pm - I tend to run on adrenalin while I'm teaching and flop as soon as I get home! It's also definitely partly baby brain though. I seem to have reached that stage of breaking off half way through a sentence as I've completely forgotten what I'm saying and of going up stairs and forgetting why. I set the washing machine going four times last week without putting the washing liquid in. Four times! Once I can understand but really! My bump is growing pretty big now, and I'm starting to feel as though I've been pregnant for a year. I think that this baby is going to be a kick boxer :)

The craft show at the Winchester Discovery Centre went really well. It was a bit of a slow start but I had lots of lovely customers. Most of the lemonade earrings I made last week were sold, together with lots of bangles and pendants and a couple of bigger pieces, some of which I hadn't had a chance to put on the website, such as the Blue Velvet necklace above. I love the stone in this piece - it's Russian Blue Pietersite, and it's so unusual to get it in such a rich blue without hints of other colours streaking across it. It's got such velvety depths to it! The bezel setting is quite plain but I made the chain and the clasp is the flower on the front. The clasp hooks onto any of the chain links, so the new owner can change it slightly - either a long chain with the clasp right next to the stone or a shorter chain with a longer chain drop leading down to the pendant. The flower was cut out from the back of the stone setting, so even if the pendant flips over it still looks beautiful from the other side!

The other pendant that you can see here is still available, and I'll be putting it on the website this evening along with a couple of other pieces. The stone is fossilised crinoids, not something that I've been tempted to use before, but I loved the colours and the smooth shape. The setting is similar to the Blue Velvet one, but this time the clasp is a toggle in the shape of an oak leaf - I really enjoyed making this clasp, so expect to see more in this style! Both of the stones, by the way, are from my friend Brenda's etsy shop Iced Hot Rocks.

Now there was something else I had to tell you..............oh yes! The latest Beads and Beyond magazine is out!

I've got a stone set pendant in there this month, so if you'd like to learn how to make your own bezel settings like the ones I've used on these necklaces then that would be a very good starting point. I've also got the last of the "Staying Legal" series of articles in the magazine this month, this time on accounting and taxes - a subject that sounds quite horrible but really needn't be scarey, honest! I think my favourite project in there this month is Rebecca Anderson's Retro Romance set - red and turquoise are such a yummy combination!

I hope you all have lovely days today - I know I'm going to enjoy this afternoon as the sun has started to shine and I'm off to Brenda's to see her latest batch of gorgeous stones. I expect I'll be buying one or six!

Tutorial Tuesday - Sheep in the City scarf pattern

Picture from Sheep in the City blog

I have most definitely reached the stage when my bump is too big for coats to do up, and it's got pretty cold here in the mornings when I'm taking Ben to school, so I've decided to knit myself a new scarf. I've been getting organised and knitting lots of Christmas presents, so it seems like ages since I knitted myself anything! I think I've found the perfect pattern - great for showing off variegated colour yarns and an easy pattern to memorise for when I'm sitting in front of the television in the evening. I'm hoping to be able to wear it by the end of the week!

The pattern (and the photo of the scarf above) come from Sheep in the City. I'll let you know how I get on with it!

Making Lemonade out of Lemons

That's been my task this afternoon! So many little pieces of sheet left over from bigger projects but too big for the scrap pot have been building up in my silver drawer, and I've also had so many part done examples collecting on my desk, pieces that I've started as examples of sawing or piercing or texturing that I've done for my college classes. With the price of silver as sky high as it is at the moment I knew I had to get to work and use them, and this is what I've come up with! I've got a stall at Winchester Discovery Centre (we're not allowed to call it the library any more!) tomorrow, so I'm waiting until after that to put those that are left on the website.

Tutorial Tuesday - soldering tips 2

The plan had been to add a few photos to this and post it when I got back from college last night, but ended up making packed lunches for school instead - what an exciting life I lead! Anyway, it's here now!

A couple of weeks ago I posted some soldering tips with photos showing work being soldered and pickled. This time I thought I'd show you the basic tools needed to solder silver, and also talk about the different types of solder available  - and why you can get different types of solder!

This is my soldering area - a little messy, I know, but soldering isn't exactly the cleanest part of making jewellery. You don't actually need a lot of equipment to start soldering. Each tool is quite cheap, although the price can obviously add up, but if you look after the tools well they will last you for years.

Going through the labels we have:

1. Old slate tiles - left over from a DIY project, these protect the table below from the heat. You can buy soldering sheets that do the same job, but tiles are cheaper!
2. Soldering block - extra protection from the heat. These also absorb some of the heat from the flame and pass it back into the silver, so if you have several pieces on the block waiting to be soldered (for example if you are soldering lots of links for a chain), they will start to heat up before the flame even touches them. I have a couple of blocks, and if I am soldering a big piece I will prop a couple up behind the block I'm working on to radiate the heat back to the metal.
3. Charcoal block - used to melt small balls of silver such as in this tutorial
   
4. Reverse action tweezers - these take a bit of getting used to as they open when you push the handles, opposite to how most pliers work. This is useful, though, as I often use them to hold, for example, an earwire in place on the back of the earring during soldering and I don't have to remember to hold them tightly closed, they do the job for me. They are insulated.
5. Solder probe - not essential put useful for pushing solder back to where you want it to be if it moves during the process.
6. Third hand with tweezers - not essential but useful for holding small pieces during soldering.
   
7. Torches - I've got two hand torches, and also a propane torch that feeds of a gas bottle under my desk, out of sight. It is the heat of the piece of work that melts the solder, not the heat of the flame, and so if I am soldering a big piece such as a bangle I need to use a bigger torch to heat the silver up enough. The smaller torch is ideal for chains, clasps, earwires etc. The small torch came from Cookson Gold, as did most of my soldering equipment, and the big one is a plumber's torch from B&Q!
8. Quench pot - such a sophistcated expensive piece of kit! Never put hot metal in the pickle, always quench it to cool it down first.
9. Goggles - you've only got one pair of eyes!
10. Binding wire - useful for holding together larger pieces during soldering.
11. Pennies! - useful for propping up small pieces while you solder them.
12. Snips/shears - use these to cut solder strips into smaller pieces (pallions) ready to use for soldering.

 A few more bits and pieces for you:

1. Pickle pot - another expensive piece of equipment! You can buy expensive pickling units, but I use an old slow cooker that cost £2 at a carboot sale. Remember that pickle cleans the silver quicker if it is warm. As you can see in this post, the pickle sits in a pyrex dish that sits in water inside the cooker. I can't put the pickle straight into the cooker as I haven't got a ceramic insert in mine, it's just steel. If you put steel or iron (eg reverse action tweezers, binding wire) into the pickle, all of the copper the pickle has collected off the silver as it's cleaned the oxidisation off will go back on the silver! Which leads me to....
2. Brass tweezers - use these to take work out of the pickle instead of steel tweezers. You can also buy plastic tweezers.

This picture shows my soldering materials - flux and solder in various forms.

1. Borax cone and dish - a cheap and easy to use form of solder. Put a very little amount of water in the bottom of the dish and grind the cone in it to form a milky paste which is then painted onto the silver. Remember solder will only flow, rather than ball up, if flux is present.
2. Auflux - an artificial form of  flux, again relatively cheap but doesn't last as long as a cone. Again, just paint it on where it is needed.
3. Solder strips - the traditional form of solder. Cut into smaller pieces (pallions) ready to use for soldering. I have a little pot for each solder - Hard, Medium and Easy - I'll explain those terms in a bit!
4. Solder paste syringes - a modern form of solder - some people love it, some people hate it saying it's cheating! I say it's got it's place and can be useful, but it doesn't replace solder strips. Solder paste is basically ground up solid solder mixed with a flux so that it's ready to use. I only really use it for chain work as I find it more convenient - just work along the row of links waiting to be soldered, squeezing a little bit out at a time! It is much more expensive that solder strips though. Again, I've got Hard, Medium and Easy solder.

So why the different names for solders? Hard, Medium and Easy solders have different melting temperatures - hard has a higher melting temperature than medium (ie. it is harder to melt), medium has a higher melting temperature than easy. You can also sometimes buy extra-easy solder which has an even lower melting temperature.

Why do you need different melting temperatures? Because you often need to solder more than one join on a piece of work, and when you solder the second join, you don't want the first to remelt or it is likely to weakend. Take the chain in this post as an example - my Ebony necklace from this month's Beads and Beyond. The large links were soldered closed with medium solder and then hammered. If I hadn't soldered them closed first hammering would have mis-shapened them. They were then linked together with smaller round links that were closed with easy solder - the temperature needed to melt the easy solder wasn't high enough to remelt and weaken the medium solder. The small links were far enough apart that soldering one closed didn't affect the ones I'd already done. If I had needed to solder three times on the piece of work I would have started with hard, then medium and finally easy solder. On the other hand, if I only need to solder one join, for example on a bangle, then I just use easy solder as it's easier to melt.

I hope all of that makes sense - quite a technical Tutorial Tuesday this week! Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions and please do leave a comment if you have a tip of your own to share!

Order out of chaos!

This was the state of my desk this morning. In fact, this was the state of my desk from Friday lunch time, when my in-laws arrived, all over the weekend until this morning when I managed to get back in there! I always try to tidy my desk, or at least put things in orderly piles and clear a space, at the end of the day, so it made me feel a bit disorganised this morning! Thankfully my first job was to set the stones in the pendant below, so once I'd got started I felt better and I've actually got a lot done today. I've even taken photos of the pendant (obviously!) as soon as it was finished rather than put it to one side to do later - the joys of being able to have my photo studio permanently set up in my lovely new shed!

Dainty - sterling silver flower with smoky quartz and peridot - now sold, thank you!

Right then, next on my list is a late lunch/early tea (yes, strange time, I know, but I leave to teach my college classes at 5pm and don't get home until gone 10pm, so Tuesday meal times are always a bit mixed up), and then pack for college - Keum Boo for my advanced class tonight and chain making for the beginners! I'm hoping to finish another Tutorial Tuesday with more information on soldering too, but that may have to wait until I get back from college tonight!

P.S. If the pendant has caught your fancy you can find it on the website here!