21 Aug 2011

But it’s only the middle of August

Anyone has read any of my blog previously will have figured out that I like to be outdoors and preferably amongst trees. If I had my own way, I’d live like a hermit in a log cabin in woodland, spending my time as a camera and jewellery making bum without having to worry about paying the bills.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

I’ll grant you, you were pretty well hidden there amongst the long grasses, but I did spot you!

I’d be quite happy to live the simple life, I don’t need clothes shops or restaurants and night clubs, I’d be pretty happy to have fresh air, peace and quiet and would even be prepared to grow and manage much of my own food. People talk of the ‘Champagne lifestyle’ if you won the lottery. What I’d buy would be solitude. I’d buy the biggest tract of land I could afford and plonk a nice house in the middle of it. I think I’d quite like to be reasonably comfortable – I’d need a hot shower and broadband connection, but I wouldn’t need gold taps or marble floors.

Come on, play fair, we haven’t even had a summer yet!

Even the leaves that are outwardly green, are starting to turn and the green is becoming more golden.

Both of us work pretty darned hard and often very long hours and it becomes very important to us to get outside – either at the weekend or in an evening. So whenever weather is suitable – and often when it’s not – and we have the briefest of opportunities, we abandon chores and head outside. Thankfully, we don’t really have to go far, we have several nice places to walk within a ten minute drive, so come the weekend, we grab walking boots and waterproofs, camera and walking pole and head out.

A significant amount of the bracken is already turning – not just the odd dead leaf, but great patches of it.

We did one of our usual weekend routes at lunchtime today and I was astonished at how many trees were already turning to their autumnal display – many trees were both dropping leaves and turning colour – is it me, or does this seem to happen earlier every year?

I’m sure in the past, you wouldn’t see any golden leaves until well into September. It’s simply not fair, we haven’t even had a summer yet! Summer never seems to have even got going this year and here we are, already tramping over scrunchy dried leaves and feeling a bite of chill in the air.

I certainly like autumn well enough – but what I don’t like is how it sneaks up on you whilst you’re still contemplating summer and don’t feel ready for it to appear yet. We didn’t get a summer propper, so maybe we’ll get an Indian Summer?


10 Aug 2011

Introducing my new Credit Cruncher range

I’ve been aware since I first started selling my own hand crafted jewellery on-line and at craft fairs, that my prices were probably below what they should have been – considering the time I spend on pieces, the range of tools, resources and skills we need to maintain and the direct costs of actually selling – most of which have increased significantly in the last two or three years – like postage and packing materials, raw metal stock etc.

I therefore made a decision to gradually set my prices more realistically for the work and costs each piece represents and the average unit price has no doubt crept up in recent months.

Two of my new ‘Credit Cruncher’ range of less expensive pieces – handmade glass bead pendants, topped with molten copper buds and a double wrapped antiqued copper bail. 

But I’m also acutely aware that money is tight for all of us. Many of my best and long-time customers have lost jobs, had hours reduced or have other financial pressures on their household, as we all do.

A customer commented the other day that she’d love to buy a particular piece but just couldn’t justify the expense at the current time, so this set me thinking about making a range of lower priced items to address this issue.

This is a new piece I will be adding for sale shortly – antiqued copper necklace with matching earrings, wire wrapped with a line of freely moving blue green Chrysocolla dangles – but it was quite labour intensive and this will be reflected in the price.

This is my Credit Cruncher variant of the same design idea. There are fewer processes, less expensive materials and this will allow me to keep the price lower to customers.

I saw a TV programme many years ago which was a fascinating insight into how a design is developed for the high street. It started with an original blouse design – a little summer short sleeved blouse with embroidery on the pocket flaps and lots of interesting stitched details and pretty buttons.

One of my new simplified designs to keep the price down. These glossy scarlet glass beads are so striking that they don’t need anything else.

They set about cutting a pattern, working out the stages and costing the materials. They made up the garment and timed the processes and came up with a cost to make it and how much it would need to retail for to be profitable – a task that many of us must be all too familiar with. The resulting retail price was far too high to be competitive, so they set about modifying the design, process by process, detail by detail until the price to make it was in-line with other high street fashion chains and what the market could stand. Every row of stitching had a cost implication and even the direction it was sewn and the order it was assembled had cost implications.

I have quite a lot of my own polymer clay pieces that I’m putting together for the Credit Cruncher range. I sold several necklaces with these heart pendants on and thought they were all gone and I found one I’d seemingly squirreled away.

They replaced the original breast pocket which had a separate flap over fastened down with a pretty button and embroidered flower to a single piece pocket with a top stitched detail to look like a flap and a less expensive decorative and non-functional flower button sewn directly onto the pocket – they eliminated several stages and a chunk of saving in the materials too. This process was repeated with the front placket, collar, shaped hem and sleeve. Even the separate body panels that gave it the fitted shape were eliminated for shaped darts and the 7 buttons of the original shirt were whittled down to 5.

The finished high street version was superficially very similar, but a much trimmed down process, halving the manufacturing cost and bringing the retail price in-line with customer expectations and making it profitable to sell.

I have a lot of accumulated semi-precious beads and used to sell a lot of these simple silver plated wire wrapped bracelets and someone asked me recently why I no longer made them, so I’ll be adding a few more back to the shop. This one is black spider web jasper.

So I’ve applied this thinking to some of my own designs this week – looking at elements that customers like and are familiar in my work, but trying to streamline the processes to be able to offer a range of pieces at lower price points – I’m calling this range my Credit Crunchers.

I’m also re-photographing some earlier designs to give their shop pages a new lease of life.

It’s early in the process yet, but I already feel pretty good that this is something worth doing – none of us have any money and whilst I’m still keen to stretch my ability and make progressively sophisticated work – I think there’s still a place for pieces that I can make more quickly by streamlining the amount of processes and in using more modestly priced materials.

I don’t aim to compromise my work or customer service ethic in any manner, but there are other ways in which I can make savings for the customers.

1 Aug 2011

A leisurely approach proved very productive

I think the aspect of being an on-line sole trader jewellery maker that troubles me most, is finding the time to do everything that’s necessary, properly. I never come close to doing everything I plan for any given week.

When you do everything yourself from designing, making, managing web sites and selling venues, marketing, photographing, packing orders and speaking directly to customers – there are just never enough hours in the day and the luxury of time to just tinker with design ideas and new pieces is somewhat limited. Yet I’m also mindful that constantly developing my skills is essential too, so pushing myself with new ideas is actually a necessity.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.
One of my favourite spots at Beacon Fell. I’ve photographed this scene many times and have never quite yet captured the shot the way I want to. You walk through a very dark corridor of trees and on sunny days, the clearing at the end of the path positively glows as a beacon through the darkness.

Last weekend, we decided to just turn our backs on the long list of chores and took ourselves out for the day, got some fresh air, had a walk and a picnic and thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so, that we planned the same for this weekend, but on Saturday we felt it was a little too hot for the walk we’d panned (and we couldn’t go too far as he was on-call) and decided instead to just potter in the garden. We got our planned walk when it was a little cooler on Sunday.

Some dramatic lighting when the clouds broke after a dark dull spell during our evening walk earlier in the week.

We don’t seem to have been able to enjoy eating in the garden as often in recent years, the weather has never seemingly been suitable on days we’re about and we’ve really missed the luxury of a leisurely breakfast al fresco, something we both really enjoy and value. So we started the weekend as we meant to go on. We did have to laugh however, our quiet slow-paced peaceful breakfast outside was accompanied by the most enormous cacophony of sounds – lots of coming and going and car doors slamming, someone had a chainsaw going, some workmen were up ladders and shouting to each other, an alarm had been set off, even the weekend steam train passing blew it’s whistle several times. So whilst it was enjoyable, it wasn’t that peaceful.

Chunky molten Sterling silver drops. I decided for security (due to the weight of the pebble) to spiral the earwire at the back and make a decorative feature of it too.

So having decided to stay at home and just potter, once the essential chores had been done, he set about finishing his book and I wanted to work on some ideas I’d had for myself – much of which I could plan and work on in the garden.

I had intended to polish the molten pebbles of silver very smooth, but once pickled, it was clear that they had the beginnings of a reticulated surface and I rather liked the tiny ripples, so only polished for shine, not to smooth them too far.

As I have long and messy (dragged through a hedge backwards my mother calls it) hair, wear glasses and often walk wearing ear buds with my MP3 player, adding dangly fiddly earrings to the mix does have the potential for painful entanglement. So for a while I’d been planning on making myself some plain studs from molten nuggets of Sterling silver. As I’d used the best of my stash of molten nuggets on recent pieces, I was due to make some more for stock anyway.

I made the largest of the nuggets into plain studs, also leaving the slightly reticulated surface in place. These pebbles are 9mm (0.35″) in diameter, so a decent weight and size.

But as is often the case, my mind took on a journey of its own and I ended up working rather differently than my initial thoughts and I think the results are all the better for it. I made myself a pair of molten nugget drops in the end, I decided that they suited me better slightly dropped below my earlobe and then made another slightly larger pair to sell, as well as a large pair of plain studs.

The fruits of my leisurely afternoon in the garden – the smaller back pair are for me and the other two pairs to sell.

I also had an idea for a customer order who wanted big chunky wraps above the faceted labradorite beads she’d chosen, which called for me to abandon my leaning towards really tightly controlled work and wrap them somewhat more loosely than my usual style. I liked the results and made another pair to sell too.

Faceted Labradorite with chunky triple wrapped tops in Sterling silver.

So having set out to spend the time leisurely in the garden, I actually had a very productive (and most enjoyable) afternoon – much more so than if I’d sat down with work I had to get done. And I’ve always felt that when you enjoy making something, it shows in the work; pieces made under pressure or sufferance are rarely your best work. Perhaps I need to decide not to do anything more often.

I also got on a roll in the evening with photographing recent pieces and made a nice big dent in my backlog, including the rosebud knot earrings to match recently blogged pendants, a finished bracelet that I’d totally overlooked and a darkly oxidised variant of a stock bracelet I usually sell in a slightly lighter ‘antiqued’ finish. Now I need to sit down and write descriptive text for 11 new items to list for sale! Wish me luck.

For some reason, I’d made this bracelet some time ago, but it had been overlooked in my ‘backlog waiting to be photographed’ box. This is a finer more delicate version of the ones I’ve previously shown. 

Two different designs of rosebud knot teardrop earrings to match my earlier pendant design – I wasn’t sure which approach I preferred, so finished both pairs.
Whilst re-making this design that I usually aim to keep in stock, I oxidised one version darker than the antiqued finish I normally offer it in, so will add this as an alternative finish.

19 Jul 2011

This weeks fixation is . . .

Further to my last post about the new teardrop pendant I’d been working on, as often is the case, I get somewhat fixated with a design idea or technique and work several variants of it in short order.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

I don’t suppose for one minute that I’m any different from other designers in this respect – once you get attuned to working on something, your mind just runs away with it and the more you work, the more variants and ways you can use the element pop into your mind.


Thus is has been over the last few days. I’ve fine-tuned my method so that I can make them consistently and with a symmetrical shape and my head is full of ideas to work on – like it needed any more in there fighting for my attention.

The first photographs above are of what was the initial prototype I made from a soldered oval I already had on my bench. As the soldered join was a little untidy, I thought it might be nice to cover it with a molten silver nugget and make a feature of it. It was also quite small and didn’t have much weight to it, so this will help it hang nicely. I’m going to keep this one myself and as I almost always wear pendants on a Sterling silver snake chain, the silver nugget will co-ordinate with that.


I also made some larger copper teardrops, more in line with the shape of the silver one – which had been my intended shape all along. I kept one highly polished and plain like the silver and another I adorned with an internal squiggle with hammered molten button ends, wrapped to the outer teardrop frame and supplemented with a couple of wrapped tiny copper beads – antiqued to enhance the textures.

It perhaps isn’t evident from the photographs above, but the bails are at 90 degrees to the body of the teardrops , so that they hang perfectly perpendicular to the chain they’re on. I’d photographed at angles to show the twist between the two loops of the teardrop and bail eye, but it does sit straight and central to the body of the pendant. I’ll unfortunately have to leave my ideas for a day or two as I have other non-jewellery work to do.


Post script:

Famous last words above; I knew I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I had to wait for a client to get back to me today before I could complete some work for them and I was able to finish this further variation that I started a couple of days ago. I’ve done various pieces with rosebud knots in the past and seeing (at the time) a rosebud knot piece in the ‘I’m currently working on’ box on the right, I wondered if it could be combined with the teardrop shape – which would rely on the knot retaining its shape whilst I made the pendant shape above it – which places quite some forces on the metal.

Thankfully, in this gauge of wire, it did and I was thrilled to bring two of my favourite recent techniques together. Even as I write that, I have a further idea to bring the teardrop together with another of my often used techniques – so it’s off to the sketch book yet again.

This version is made from a single length of heavy copper wire, which hasn’t been soldered in this instance, the knot holds it together.