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!