Beautiful Autumn!

Yes, it's been too long since I updated! Any of you who are on Etsy will know that there have been some major upheavals there over the past few months and I've been scrambling to work around them. And now the Christmas rush has started! I shipped out 12 packages yesterday...

Anyway, the topic of the post is actually nothing to do with jewellery, but beautiful and inspirational colours! I went home to Buckinghamshire a couple of weeks ago and autumn was in full-swing! I often moan about this season since the British summer seems so short and the lenghtening nights can be pretty depressing, but this visit home made me remember what's so gorgeous and magical about it.

First up the view of our back garden; I love the long shadows cast by the sun through the trees. It was very late in the day (well, 4 in the afternoon, but late daylight speaking!) and it was almost dusk but the sun being low in the sky cast these amazing shadows. I also love the sun coming through the blaze of colour in the centre!

Out in the front garden, we have an overgrown holly bush/tree. I was astounded at the riotous red of all those berries! It's easily the most berries I've seen on them before. A lot of firs around the holly were chopped down about a year ago and I have to wonder if the profusion of berries is due to all that extra light. I haven't noticed an abnormally large berry harvest elsewhere!

And a close up of the holly!

On the other side of the drive we have variegated holly which I think looks lovely. We often get neighbours sneakily (or not so sneakily) cutting some to use in their Christmas decorations! We don't mind though--the bush is so overgrown it could use a little vigourous pruning!

And I saw this weird little piece of mutant variegated holly. No chlorophyll at all! No photosynthesis, purely decorative :)

Such a strange change of the seasons. The autumn berries are out at the same time as the late roses. There are still buds! I hope the first frosts won't kill them.

This hydrangea looked amazing as well. In the spring, it was a lovely combination of pale pink and blue, but the fading colours have given it a totally new look!

And finally. the view looking up to the sky from underneath the colourful trees in the first picture :)

Psst--Whilst clearing out my room, I found these two little cuties! I forgot I had these lovely vintage Julips :)

That's all for now. I should have an update on the jewellery side of things soon! (And some sneaky looks at presents I'm making for my family...I'm fairly sure they don't know this site...!)

Fingerprint Jewellery!

So, over the last couple of weeks, I've been experimenting with a dinky idea I found on the interwebs: fingerprint jewellery. You can take a mould of someone's fingerprint and then imprint it into the metal clay to make a perfect little keepsake charm.

I've spent the last two weeks undergoing furious bouts of trial and error mixed with a healthy dose of despair, but finally came up with a method that worked to my satisfaction:

So, I got super-excited when I first saw this idea and determinedly marched off to have a go myself (perhaps a little naively!). With the cost of silver clay so high, I was very aware that practising and making example pieces to show on Etsy would have to come out of my own pocket, since these pieces are so personalised, which led to my first amazing discovery:

Namely, the fantastic area of London that is Hatton Garden. Yes, yes, I know, it's a mecca for jewellery, but I thought that was only expensive high-end shops. It turns out that a lot of the major online UK sellers of silver clay have stores in or near Hatton Garden, which, given that it's a fifteen minute walk from my flat, sent me into paroxysms of delight :D Rashbel's were having a 10% off in-store sale which meant I could get clay at £1.80 per gram, by far the cheapest since the recent price hike, without having to pay their huge shipping costs (also, btw, the guy in the shop? Had the most massive biceps and amazing tats I've ever seen!) Cooksons also have a trade counter in Hatton Garden, where you can pick up your online orders for free just a couple of hours after you place the order. I'll definitely be ordering from them again in the future!

I must have tried about a million different types of silicon putty, trying to find the best combination for the mould. Actually, I used about £20 worth of the stuff just perfecting my technique so that I could give clear instructions to customers. Eventually, I setttled on siligum (which, if you're interested, you can get from Paperchase on Tottenham Court Road at a student discount, provided you're a student of course!) and some purple stuff to make the reverse which I got from www.pmcshop.co.uk. The latter also came with a nifty set of mini pots which has been really useful for sending out the putty to customers.

But that was only the first step! Once I had the mould, how best to imprint it? I ended up using Slik as mould release (olive oil just wasn't cutting it for the fine detail and was cracking the clay something fierce) and practising with each mould in polymer clay first to see where the detail was least obvious. I could then make sure that those parts of the mould were impressed more firmly into the metal clay. But let me tell you, that juggling polymer clay and metal clay and going back and forth between them without drying out the metal clay is a skill all in itself!

I then hit another snag with adding the patina. Just dumping it in the Liver of Sulphur solution and then polishing as normal ended up with an uneven patina. So again, trial and error. I found that gradually polishing up the print with middling polishing papers, followed by higher grits and then swapping back out worked best. Really slow, careful work. (But at least, you can stick the sucker under a torch and have another go pretty easily!)

The finished result? See for yourself:

PS. Also discovered a great little site called FotoFuze which turns white or black backgrounds into professional looking white or black backgrounds!

And the reward? Three sales in under a week :) I might manage to buy a UV lamp and have a go at photopolymer plates at this rate!


Next time: Christmas decorations? In July? Why yes!

Precious Metal Clay and Imagepac--Product Reviews

So, before I left to enjoy the wonders of Tobago and Scuba Diving:

                                 

     

               

(sorry, sorry, had to brag!)


I discovered the wonders of something a lot closer to home (or well, from Japan). It's called Precious Metal Clay and is pretty awesome stuff. It's essentially miniscule specks of silver (or copper or gold) suspended in organic binders that give it the consistency of clay. It's an air-drying clay, but not nearly as sticky as epoxy clays. You can shape it just like other clay and then fire it (I've been using a butane torch), the binders burn away and leave 99.9% pure silver--or fine silver, which actually has a higher silver content than sterling.

My first impressions were...frustrating at best. The clay seemed to crack and fall apart the second I took it out of the packet, but eventually I realised this was because I'd been using too much oil to coat my hands with (seriously, less is definitely more here). Once I had that sorted out, nothing could stop me and the creative juices have been flowing ever since!

Here's a set of earrings that were inspired by the beautiful flowers I saw in Tobago:

I used PMC for the flowers themselves and fine silver wire for the stamens. The posts are sterling

The main problem with PMC is the price. As the clay is almost 100% silver, the price follows the price of silver. Unfortunately, silver is one of the most undervalued commodities around. Just a few years ago it was selling at about $4 an ounce. Current projections are that it will be around $40 an ounce by the end of 2011. Necessarily, the companies that make silver clay have to pass this price increase on to their suppliers who pass it on to us, the consumers. Consequently, prices have risen by almost 300% in one year. And it looks like it'll get worse. Forecasters warn that by 2015, silver may be selling for $400 an ounce. So the future of silver clay as a hobbyist's material looks very uncertain. One site I used to buy from has already discontinued selling as they think people can't afford it anymore. If you want to get into it, I'd suggest do it now!



Imagepac

Not long after I started playing with PMC, I realised that texturing is a great way of adding interest to the piece, but all the commercial ones available online were a) very expensive and b) unoriginal which is hardly surprising as they pretty much have a captive market.

Thus I discovered, the next great thing, Imagepac! Or rather, Stamp It (the cheaper alternative). These utilise a form of photosensitive polymer in sachets that harden upon contact with light--thus you can make a negative of your artwork and the clear or white parts will harden while the black parts will stay soft and can be washed away.

Again, my initial impressions of this product were very frustrating. The instructions included are misleading if they think you can immediately make amazing stamps with the kit--maybe some people can, but I certainly couldn't and I'd put that down to two factors: a) Problems with your artwork b)Problems with your setup

Artwork problems are addressed relatively easily--there's a wealth of information out there about how to get the best results. Summarised, only have black and white images (no greys) and make sure the black is laid down by your computer as heavily as possible so absolutely no light can get through it (hold it up to your lamp to test).

The far larger problem lies in the setup. Everybody will have a slightly different lamp, a slightly different wattage output, a different bulb. Since the exact timings of exposure are so important, any slight difference from the setup they suggest will mean the stamps come out differently. I therefore wasted almost the entire box of polymer sachets that came with the kit working out the exposure times for me. Those sachets are expensive, but once you've sorted it out, so long as you can set everything up exactly the same way again, your stamps will work time after time.

The settings I used here were: 60w daylight Phillips bulb (the same I advocated in my post on how to make a light box) at 17cm height from the table. First exposure of 2 minutes 30s and the second for 12 minutes. Final exposure after washing for 15 minutes with the lamp as close as possible

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Here's the final metal clay piece that was created from a finished stamp (once again, inspired by the dozens of hummingbirds in Tobago!)

Here's another piece I made from some lineart of a horse!

These items are all, of course, available on my Etsy Shop!

I'm really chuffed with this process. As soon as I know I can consistently turn photos into decent lineart and reproduce them with the photopolymer sachets, I'll be offering custom-made charms and jewellery for people who want to wear their photos in solid silver! Very excited :D

I'm back!

Just a quick post to say I'm back from my adventures in the Caribbean :D It was amazing and I got loads of inspiration for crafty things. There'll be a post up in the next couple of days on precious metal clay pieces inspired by my stay in Tobago!

Friday Update: Here there be dragons!

So, what have I been doing this week? Aside from singing in a performance of Rachmaninov's 'The Bells of Moscow' (lovely and christmassy!), I caught the creation bug a few nights ago and just had to make these cute little fellas :

This little guy is a baby forest dragon. He's clutching a white freshwater pearl tight in the coils of his tail (it's his first piece of treasure and he's very proud!). His name's Timolair but he's Tim to all his friends :)

This girl is a water dragon and she's a little bit older, so she's managed to hold onto this larger Swarovski ivory pearl (but then, pearls are a lot easier for her to find, living in the sea). Her name's Ruto (kudos if you know where that's from!)

Both of them are made from some polymer clay I had lying around and decorated with eyeshadow colours! They both have hooks hidden in the back and jump rings to attach them as charms or pendants too :) I really like them, so I'm definitely going to start making more. Maybe I'll have a whole line: fire, wood, stone, iron etc The possibilities are endless ;)

And yes, I'm pretty sure I'll be selling them at some point. Although, you'll have to give me a while until I stop stroking them... ;)

Friday update. Pearls galore!

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, then pearls are surely her favourite sister...

Just a quick update to show you what I've been up to this week.

This one is a commission; it's taken up most of my time this week because the commission was put in a long time ago but the pearls take 2-3 weeks to arrive and I'm super-slow at knotting >.< What beautiful pearls they are though!

Freshwater, natural pink pearls 6.5mm-7mm AA++ and a 9ct solid gold clasp.

 

Also, this week, I've been working on some Swarovski pearl jewellery. These little cluster earrings:

Swarovski glass pearls in three sizes, sterling silver chain and earwires.

And this Victorian vintage-inspired necklace:

Swarovski glass pearls, crystal spacers, silver-plated connector

  So that's what I've been up to. Both the cluster earrings and the above necklace will be listed on my Etsy shop this weekend and I'm going to give the pink pearl necklace to its recipient this weekend too :) I'll let you know what she thinks!

I'm also planning on running a little experiment into oxidation methods soon, so watch this space if you're interested :)

How to make your own, cheap light tent!

So this is a little later than planned. Sorry; it's been a super busy week for me. I performed Mozart's Requiem in front of an archbishop on Friday which is always fun. Also there were brownies when I went up to Leeds which makes me a happy bunny!

So, I've been having problems taking decent photos of my crafts recently. Living in a flat in London, especially at this time of year, the light is brief and usually quite weak. Having nowhere outside that I would be happy taking expensive jewellery out in order to photograph, I decided to finally bite the bullet and build myself a light tent.

For those of you who don't know about them, light tents are great things. They essentially diffuse harsh light to eliminate unwanted shadows and allow you to totally control every aspect of your lighting. There are professional models like this one, the EZ Cube:

www.ezcube.com

but these can run to some pretty high prices before you even start thinking about lighting setups. For somebody like me who's only wanting to take decent photos for online auction sites, shelling out upwards of £100 seems a bit excessive. So I had a look around at the basic construct and thought "hey, I bet I could make one of those!".

So I did. The total cost? £3.12 :D

So, first, I want to show you some 'before' photos. Below are two photos I took of the Breyer model horse 'Polaris' who will be modelling some tack for me in a later post. There's one photo without flash and one photo with flash.

The exposure has been corrected here, but even so, the details get drowned out.

Here, the flash totally wipes out the whites and flattens a lot of the detail.

Poor Polaris doesn't look that great. He really does have a beautiful black rabicano pattern, but from these pictures you wouldn't know it. These photos were both taken indoors with normal yellow light. They'd be slightly better if taken outside, but you're constantly at the whim of the weather when taking photos outdoors (though if you want to try, overcast days are better than bright sunny days since the light is 'softer').


So, what you'll need to make your very own cheap light tent:

• a cardboard box. Big enough to fit whatever you want to photograph inside it. I think the bigger the better. I saved mine for almost a year before I got around to using it, but you could always ask a supermarket or another shop if they have any they're throwing out at closing time. 
• White tissue paper or fabric. I used tissue paper because it was free and on hand. Basically anything white and translucent will work.
• Daylight bulb (and a desklamp to put it in, of course). This is the most important part of the kit. I really recommend getting a daylight one since yellow light can really distort colours. They're pretty easy to find on the internet. I bought mine for £1.62
• Pretty paper to use as a backdrop. I bought mine from Paperchase for £1.50 but you could use anything lying around, really. Even last year's wrapping paper!
• Scissors/craft knife. Anything that will be able to easily cut your box
• Ruler
• Pen
• Tape. I used brown shipping tape because I had it on hand but I imagine anything would work.

Step One: Take your cardboard box and cut out four of the panels--what will be the front, top and both sides. Measure out about a two inch border around each panel to make the 'skeleton' stronger; otherwise your box will collapse under its own weight.

Sorry for the wonkiness, but you get the idea!

Step Two: Cover the top and sides with the tissue paper/fabric. Make sure the tissue paper is taut and that all edges are taped down firmly so that no errant light can sneak inside.

Now, you could leave it like this. It depends on what you want to take photos of, but if you take photos of very reflective items like I do, you'll want to add another flap that covers the front (but don't be a muppet like me and tape it all up before realising you need to be able to put stuff in and take it out again *facepalm*)

Here, I've folded down the flap to cover the front and cut a hole to fit the lens of my camera through. This is only needed when I'm taking photos of something like a piece of silver; it stops you from taking a photo of yourself taking a photo... Mostly, I leave this flap up.

Yeah, it doesn't look pretty, but that doesn't matter ;)

Step Three: Fit your backdrop. The idea of this is to have a nice curve from the back top edge all the way down to the near bottom edge, leaving no creases and lines to show up in the photos.

Step Four: Set up your desktop lamp nearby as in the image above, turn off the lights and snap away!

Now you can start taking your photos. Here's Polaris modelling some of that tack I was telling you about earlier:

Now that you can control your lighting, you can try out all sorts of interesting effects. Try lighting from the side only, or putting some coloured tissue paper over one side. Experiment! Go wild! You'll find it a lot easier to get the photos you want now :)

And all for £3.12. I hope somebody finds this little tutorial helpful!

Tune in again to see more about that tack as well as an update on my Etsy shop.

First Sale!

I made my first sale last night :) Less than 40 minutes after listing the item.

This is the item that sold:

It generated quite a lot of views and hearts even before it sold so it may be an item I make again in the future! The matching earrings are still in the shop :)


It's kind of thrown me, because I totally wasn't expecting anything to sell until I'd started marketing/advertising fairly aggressively which I plan to start on Monday. It left me scrambling to get all my shipping stuff together and ready to go today, so I went down to Paperchase and bought some nice card and paper which will last me for an age. Everything else, I've managed to recycle!

I also hadn't put together any business cards yet, so threw together these really quickly in about half an hour:






I know they're not as good as they could be but I think they're pretty good for just half an hour's work. I like how I'll be able to rotate the pictures to keep up to date with my current stock :)

Hopefully, I'll be blogging a lot in the future about my experiences setting up shop. I think it could be useful to other potential sellers to be able to avoid the mistakes I make!

So, without further ado, the things I have learned so far:

1. Research, research, research! Read everything you can find about setting up an Etsy shop, designing your collection, putting your image together, marketing etc etc. It's saved me countless mistakes, I'm sure. Though I'm equally sure I'll make plenty of my own!

2. Have a good number of items to open your shop with. I'd suggest between 10 and 20 at least! Upload the first few all at once and then:

3. Stagger your item listings! A couple every hour or so during peak hours if you have the stock to do so. Having a mostly US customer base, Etsy peak hours tend to be pretty late here. I'm still experimenting, but so far I've found that listing items at about 10pm here in the UK generates the most views.

4. Have all your shipping stuff ready to go as soon as you set up! You may be lucky like me ;) And you'd be surprised about the number of small things you don't even think about until they're big problems shouting at you in the face--like, having no glue or sellotape to seal the box and put the address on...*facepalm*



Tomorrow, I'm off up to Leeds to see my sister for the weekend! (And maybe her husband will make brownies? :D I live in perpetual hope!) So, I won't be doing much with my Etsy shop. I plan to take photos of a few more items tomorrow morning which I'll be listing up in Leeds, but otherwise, I'll be taking a break. It's only just started but I feel like it's been months! (Well, technically, it has, really!) I had a bit of a breakthrough with the novel I'm writing recently, too, so it'll be nice to get some of that without feeling guilty about not doing Etsy stuff :)

I might also be able to get the light box tutorial up tomorrow. It'll probably depend on access to the computer, but we'll see.

See you soon
xxx

And We're Off!

Whee, first blog post!

So, after a much longer time than I had anticipated, I finally opened my Etsy Shop tonight. Phew, took me almost two hours just to list the first 16 items going into my shop!

Go take a look:

www.midnightbluejewels.etsy.com


I really underestimated how much time it takes to set everything up. The actual making of the jewellery probably takes the least amount of time of the whole process. Endless hours of research finally led me to the best ways to do everything, but there was still a lot of trial and error. First, there's getting the right materials and tools for your items, then learning the techniques to make them. Once you have your lovely piece of jewellery, then you have to get good photos of it, write an honest and engaging description, choose which photos you're going to use. Not to mention all the effort that will go into advertising and promoting starting tomorrow!

I found the hardest thing was getting decent photos and after much frustration, I finally resorted to making myself a light box which helped immensely. Stay tuned for the next post where I'll give a short tutorial on how to make your own!

It's bedtime now, though, so hopefully when I wake up in the morning my Etsy items will have lots of views and maybe even a sale!