It's nearly party time!

Yes, the Bead Soup Blog Party is tomorrow! This last week of creating time has flown by, but my jewellery is finished ready to show everyone tomorrow. I had a couple of ideas of what to make with the ingredients that Janna sent me, and I've more or less kept to them - there's silver (of course!), a bit of sparkle, some seedbeads (yes, really! I've used seedbeads!), some silk and of course the beauitful sea urchin pendant and silver clasp that Janna sent, but that's all the hints you're getting! Come back tomorrow morning and I'll show you the results, and also the list of other bloggers taking part in the party this time. For now though, just look at how international this party is!

BTW

Remember this little cupcake tin of goodies?

I finally had more time to work on them this afternoon while Jamie had a nap and they turned into this....

The plan tomorrow is to finish this necklace, edit photos for some new products and finish my bead soup jewellery - oh, and go to the dentist for some work following the surgery earlier this year :( Well, I suppose I can't have fun all day while Ben's at school and Jamie is at the childminders!

Tutorial Tuesday - using a joint leveller

The October issue of Beads and Beyond has just come out and, together with the owl pendant above (which was inspired by the beautiful ceramic owl that my friend Hellie gave me for Christmas last year), I've also written a masterclass on using rivets in your work. I went through a stage of not using rivets much, but I love them again now, and they are much easier to do than you might think at first. The trickiest parts I find are cutting just the right length of wire or tube for the rivet, and cutting the fiddly short length of tube straight. However, the second part of that is made much easier with a joint leveller, a great tool that holds your tube (or thick wire) still for you while you cut it. It's called a joint leveller as the main use in jewellery making for tube is for making small hinges on items such as bangles and lockets, and when making these you need to make sure that the ends of the tube are level. This tool not only holds the tube in place but guides the blade so that you cut straight across the tube.

I showed a picture of my joint leveller in the masterclass and wrote about it, but as I'm always limited by both word count and the number of photos I can include I thought I'd write a bit more about it here. It was pretty difficult for T to get decent photos of me using the joint leveller, but he did his best! I've tried to show how I hold and use it. You can get a couple of different designs of joint levellers. The simplest (and therefore the cheapest) just holds the tube for you in a clamp that has a handle. The next one up (mine, pictured above) has a sliding stopper, and the next one above that (and the most expensive) has a sliding stopper that has a gauge on it it.

The sliding stopper is used to hold the tube at the correct length for cutting - undo the screw, slide the stopper to the correct position, do the screw up again and pop in the tube - or in this case, the thick square wire. With a gauge its easier to set the leveller to allow you to cut at a particular length, but given the price difference between the two models I just use a rular! The distance to measure is that between the slot where the blade goes and the end of the slide.

The metal bar then comes over to hold the tube in place while you are cutting. I hold the bar down with my thumb, hold the handle in my fist, and rest the leveller on top of my bench peg. The saw blade then goes inside the slot, and away you go!

Btw, the two pieces of square wire that I cut off while taking the photos for this tutorial were sanded and turned into these simple textured stud earrings.

New year, new projects

I started writing this post at the beginning of last week, but  getting used to a new routine at the start of the new school year and sorting the house out after the summer holidays took up much more time than I expected! So, no blogging, but I did have some time in the workshed creating - some of which I can show you later (new designs to go in my Golden Collection!), some of which I can't show you yet (Bead Soup!), and some work by the students I had last weekend.

To me September is always the start of the new year, not January. That's what comes of going straight from school to university to teacher training to teaching I suppose. I've only had just under three years away from organising my life according to school terms since I was four, and that was in between leaving teaching and Ben starting at preschool. So, to me September is a time of fresh starts, of making plans, an excuse to go and buy stationery in cool colours - and for starting new projects - as if I haven't already got plenty on the go! Ben started back at school last week, excited at seeing his friends every day again. He's in Year 1 now so I'm bracing myself for lots more homework, and also for him being very tired by the halfterm holidays, especially as he started swimming lessons on Sunday and has his first football club session this afternoon after school. He had no worries about moving into a different classroom with a new teacher though - his school are very good about preparing the children for changes, and he spent a couple of days with his new teacher before the summer holidays. My boy is growing up!

So, my plans for the new term so far .....

• teach myself Tunisian crochet someone I was chatting to at a craft group I've been along to a few times now (and would go more often if it didn't clash with hospital appointments etc ) was enthusing about Tunisian crochet, saying it was almost twice as fast as knitting, and faster than "normal" crochet, and great for blankets. I want to make a new blanket to snuggle under on our new sofa (which we haven't ordered yet) in our newly decorated sitting room (which we haven't decorated yet). Yes, I am planning the blanket before I've even stripped the wallpaper! Which leads me to... 
• decorate the front room we painted the front room (which actually runs the depth of the house) when we first moved in ten years ago and I am desperate to again, this time getting the walls skimmed first. It's going to look great when it's finished but it's going to take a lot of work. 
• make stacker rings for some reason I really want to make some simple rings at the moment!
•  knit myself a new scarf and I've found the perfect pattern with cables that look just as good front or back!

I think I'm going to keep it at that for the moment as I'm also going to start teaching evening classes at college again, I've got some more private tuition dates coming up, this term is always busy for orders - and, oh yes, I've got two boys (well, three if you count T!) to keep me busy - and I usually write lists that are so long I can never complete them and that makes me feel bad!

I have, of course, bought myself a lovely new diary to help keep me organised!

Commissions

I love commissions. I do get more nervous about them than I do about regular orders, as of course they are made to a client's exact requirements and are quite often made for a special occasion. I am always so flattered when clients ask me to make something special to mark a wedding or anniversary or birth especially!

I've had a couple of really lovely commissions recently, both for the same client. Vici had apparently wanted to get me to make something special for a her for a while, so when her husband asked her what she'd like for her birthday she knew what to ask for! She had seen the Dainty and the Russian Circles pendants on my website, and asked if I could find a larger pietersite stone than the Russian Circles pendant used and combine it with a silver daisy. After emails with pictures of different stones for her to choose from and phone calls back and forth to confirm exactly what she wanted, this is what we came up with....

And she also asked me to make her a Baby Daisy cuff with lapis lazuli cabochons sent in the middle daisies

The commissions took longer than commissions usually do, mainly because we wanted to wait until the Queen's Diamond Jubilee hallmark was available. It seemed a shame to commission pieces like this and not wait a few weeks to be able to get such a unique mark, especially as the mark is only available from July this year until October 2012. Vici collected her new jewellery on Thursday evening - and she loved them!

This summer's students

It's been lovely to get back to teaching this summer. And it's been lovely to have so many students! Some of the pieces that people have been working on have been fairly advanced, needing more than one session - for example making settings for faceted stones - so I can't show you photos of those yet, but I can show you these.....

Syd and Anna are a husband and wife jewellery making duo who have come out for a few tuition sessions now, and Syd has also signed up for the City and Guilds class I'm teaching at college this year. They also have fun making jewellery at Flux'n'Flame over in Dorset, and it was during the Flux'n'Flame summer school this year that Syd made the beautiful stone setting in this necklace. He finished the chain last Thursday - a combination of making loops, melting scraps of silver to make balls and forging to mirror some of the elements in the pendant - a lovely piece of work, especially considering this was the first time he had made a chain.

I had two students visit on separate days the week before. Sue visited on Tuesday, using a gift voucher that her brother had bought her for her birthday. She'd made wire and strung jewellery before and wanted to learn as many basic silversmithing techniques as possible - making a pendant from sheet and a ring from wire taught her sawing, piercing and soldering amongst others. Jane came to learn how to make Keum Boo jewellery. She made a beautifully smooth pendant and the sweetest little pair of stud earrings. I got her to melt some scrap silver as well so that she could recognise the stages that silver goes through before melting - add stud post fittings and you've got another pair of earrings!

I'll be posting new tuition dates for the rest of the year next week, and I'm trying to find a weekend date for a bangles workshop too.

BTW

A very quick post tonight as it's been a bit of a hectic day - dentist appointments, general back to school stuff to finish off and a magazine deadline to meet. I did have time to go to the sorting office and collect a parcel from Mindy Macgregor and make a pair of stud earrings for a friend's birthday present, so there was jewellery fun in the day too!

As soon as I saw this beautiful cabochon in Mindy's etsy shop I just had to have it! I've got a necklace in mind for it and, unsurprisingly, it features one of my poppy clasps too.

And once I'd put the cab in my shopping basket it seemed shame not to add these too :) My favourite is the blue dotted and red striped bead. The plan is to turn these into pendants like the Fairisle ones I made last year.

Yet another design that I've had planned for ages! I'm really pleased with these, and hope that my friend likes them too! I'm planning on listing these and an oxidised version on the website too.