Jewelry Making

I found out about Blend Creations through the Mighty Flirt site. The Canadian husband and wife team of Eric Jean-Louis and Vivian Cheng have created an array of interesting and unusual pendants. Using modern stainless steel as an exterior housing for more traditional Asian-inspired designs and materials, they create a unique, organic contrast in their jewelry.

Some of the different types of items used for these pendants inner designs include bone, bamboo, coral, mother of pearl and Japanese Washi paper.

A little blurb about their work from the Blend Creations website:

“Eric and Vivian find inspiration for their work in the design of everything from furniture to housewares to graphic art. By fusing hand-drawn design with automated manufacturing — imagery from the East with technology from the West — the creators of Blend Creations have become a rare blend, indeed.”

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I’m currently working my way through a ton of email submissions… I need to set up some sort of official policy to handle these, but for now I just try to do them in the order received. Also, please remember there are so many that I can’t possibly write about all of you!

This one is from sharonunlimited.com, a fairly new online shop (actually, it opened only last month) created by Sharon Marzonie to provide unique jewelry making supplies and findings for artisans. They do have some nice things for sale there, so I decided to make a writeup.

A tiny bit from Sharon’s site:

“It is a place where artisans can come together to browse, shop and share in one anothers creativity … Our goal is to provide you with a unique offering of products and a high level of service that might be otherwise difficult to find.”

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I was surfing around on Style Bakery and came across some pretty cool and unusual jewelry pieces over at Bonbon Oiseau yesterday. Many of the more interesting pieces of jewelry are hair clips and adornments, but they also have more traditional necklaces and earrings as well. “They” is Brooklyn’s Deborah Stein an artist/designer who makes limited-edition and one of a kind pieces that are often based on narrative “themes” (for instance her Winter 2005 Collection is based on the influence of seasons on nature and the world around us).

I think the Bonbon Oiseau name means “Candy Bird” or “Good Bird”… but anyhow, to call them bonbons might be an apt term, because her work often reminds me of tiny little artistic jewelry treats that are put together with care for people to enjoy.

A quote from Deborah’s website about her jewelry design philosophy:

“Designing jewelry is a natural extension of what I do and what excites me in painting: experimenting with materials and color, evoking a mood or essence of one and the challenge of telling a personal story with an ending open to interpretation. With jewelry as a medium, there’s an incredible sense of spirit and intimacy connecting me with my client, the client and her piece, her and the world.”

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I was contacted by Lisa Braithwaite the other day about her DIY jewelry outfit called Elle B. and decided to make a post about it since she has a large variety of handmade earrings, necklaces and bracelets in her store. Based in Santa Barbara, she makes use of unique shape and color combinations in her jewelry. Although I think a lot of the beads, glass and findings that she uses in her creations may be available in shops, it’s the delightful way that they are integrated that makes her work stand out.

A little bit about her, from her website:

… Always an artistic thinker, Lisa explored drawing, painting, singing, acting and costume design before finding her calling in the jewelry arts. She has been designing and creating vibrant, wearable art for more than 20 years.

As her hobby has grown into a business, Lisa’s art has evolved, too. Her one-of-a-kind pieces incorporate modern and vintage glass, brilliant silver and vivid hues. Graceful movement and lively color make Elle B. jewelry playful and distinctive - wearable art for unique women.

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I haven’t really written up a DIY jewelry making project article in so long. I finally had the time to put this one together on Making Simple Beaded Rings which I’ve been meaning to write about forever.

These beaded rings use tiny seed beads and monofilament line to create simple but very pretty looking jewelry. One nice thing about this project is that it only requires a few supplies, both of which are readily available:

Tutorial on How To Make Beaded Rings

Kiku is a little DIY shop that I came across the other day that makes fused glass jewelry and other accesories. I like the unusual shapes and colors of these playful items.

The fused glass is actually made by putting the pieces of glass together into a kiln and melting them into each other. I’ve always wanted to try fused glass but since I don’t have a kiln handy just yet, I’m once again in “admiring others” mode when it comes to glasswork like this.

Laurie from Kiku makes a wide array of fun necklaces, pendants, bracelets, earrings, pins, rings and even belt buckles and cufflinks. Her site says she uses “Bullseye transparent and opaque glass” as well as CBS Dichroic glass to make her jewelry. I believe that she’s based in the Chicago area.

Some of my favorite Kiku pieces of jewelry are the unusual shaped items like this aptly named Sizzle Pin. It a starfish shaped opaque red, orange, and yellow glass pin that is about 2 3/4″ wide.

A lot of her jewelry seems affordably priced as well… this one was marked down to $20. There are quite a few other cool abstract pins like this one.

I also like the mod styled “Tag Necklaces” which feature colorful thin discs of fused glass with an offcenter hole in them. This golden amber one is called “Ambush” and is accented by specks of crushed lavender glass and is hung on a 16 inch sterling silver chain.

Two others that I liked that aren’t pictured here are the “Balance” disc necklace which features turquoise glass layered with purple, and the “Purple Donut” which is dark purple with crushed pink accents.

You can check out other items at the Kiku site: www.kiku-co.com

I found some pretty cool looking beads the other day made by the Aleale Bead company. This Czech Republic based company is so named after the first three letters of the first names of the two founders: Alena Chládková and Alexander Chládek.

They make all different types of handmade glass beads but some of my favorites are their “animal” beads. I really like the style of these glass bead animals… they’re sort of playful and almost cartoon-like, but are also very dignified in their look.

The funny little Tomcat Bead that they make is a cat with an orange face and blue ears, but with a black and pistachio colored striped body. For some reason it reminds me of hieroglyphics, maybe in the way that it is standing up instead of a traditional pose. A very cute looking bead!

This other bead I chose to show is of a colorful Ladybug (known as ladybird in many other places. It has a red wings dotted with black like a normal ladybug, but to me it looks like the funny looking head is twisted around so that it’s looking back at you. The orange nose (is that a nose) was a nice little touch.

I don’t know too much about their style of beads but I believe that it is semi-influenced from the “Bohemian” style, which is so called because of its origins in the country(?) called Bohemia. Apparently, there was a vibrant glass bead making culture there for over 500 years which was interrupted during WWII. Here is a bit of info from Aleale’s site about their influences:

The art of glass beadmaking has been practiced for more than four thousand years. Our techniques of shaping each bead by hand are derived from methods started by the ancient Egyptians, and developed over many centuries by Phoenician, Roman, Venetian and Bohemian artists. Every generation of glass bead designers gives new expression to this ancient art.

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The other day I was watching a public broadcasting station and they started a show with a softspoken guy (I don’t recall his exact name) who proceeded to present several “tips” for accomplishing things like shining up shoes with ordinary household ingredients like toothpaste and salt. I was about to change the channel when he started talking about a tip on how to clean silver jewelry using powdered Water Softener as an ingredient.

Before you read any further, here is a warning: DO NOT use this method for jewelry that has any precious stones. Also DO NOT use this method on “Antiqued” silver as it will remove the desired antiqued finish on the silver. It’s gotta be pretty much “all-silver” jewelry.

I admit I was a bit intrigued because the ingredients he used in all of his demos were simple things you’d find around the house. The only thing was that I wasn’t too familiar with Water Softener. The brands he mentioned were Calgon and Rain Drops.

Apparently, this used to be much more common in households and was for washing clothes. I tried to find more info online about water softeners, and basically found that they replace hardness in water due to calcium and magnesium with salts in the form of sodium or potassium. I am NOT into chemistry so I have no idea what the chemical reactions that take place are… in fact if anyone is a chemistry person who knows, please leave a comment.

OK, so his method was to take an aluminum pie plate, the kind you’d get with store bought pies. I believe that you can also use a plate covered with aluminum foil as well. Then he added 1 tablespoon or so of ordinary table salt and 1 tablespoon or so of the aforementioned powdered water softener. Then he added some extremely hot (though not boiling) water to the pie plate and stirred to dissolve the salt and softener.

Now he dunked some tarnished silver items in the solution and the results were drastic and pretty amazing. The tarnish on the silver just seemed to evaporate magically. There wasn’t any rubbing or washing needed. He just dunked them in for a couple seconds and then took them out and they looked like new!

Continue reading “Water Softener Cleans Silver?” …

We’ve been stocking up on various supplies for an upcoming jewelry and craft show and the other day we came across these amazing vintage lucite beads in shades of orange and red. The colors of these beads are super vibrant which is something that we look for occasionally to give some extra splash to designs.

Along with orange and red, they had a whole assortment of similarly vibrant different colors: blue, green, purple, pink, yellow, brown, and black/white. What is particularly cool about the lucite pieces is that many of them were chunkier pieces which is also something that we haven’t used much in designs up to this point. Some of the pieces remind me of old fashioned striped licorice or hard candy.

Lucite was actually popularized by DuPont in the 1930s as an alternative to the more expensive (and now famous) plastic called Bakelite. Looking on Wikipedia, the chemical name for the tradename Lucite is Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) . It started off being used for costume jewelry and in the 1950s became extremely popular in something called Jelly Belly Jewelry (I’m not familiar with this type of vintage jewelry). Their popularity continues to this day.

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I don’t have much experience making jewelry that utilizes handmade Lampwork beads. We just haven’t worked our way up to using them in designs yet, but that’s not to say we haven’t admired them from afar! These minutely detailed glass beads are created by melting various types of glass with a torch onto some sort of mandrel(?) and then incorporating tiny color swirls, dots and other neat shapes. I have no idea how it’s done really. I just know that the end result is pretty awesome.

Glass and Splinters Studio makes some really fantastic looking lampwork beads, which they bill as “contemporary torchworked beads”. The company is run by Lorraine Allan who has set up shop in South Australia. Having had a lot of experience working in the glass industry along with her husband for many years, she eventually tried Lampwork Glass and really got into it:

I became interested in making lampwork glass beads in 1997 after doing a weekend workshop with Peter Minson in Victoria, Australia. This led me on to enrol in a silver jewellery course for 12 months which I incorporated my glass beads into the pieces I made. Since 2001 I have put all my other glass making aside to concentrate fully on lampworking beads. Watching the glass melting and flowing in an open flame, is the most relaxing work I have ever done with glass, I don’t think I will ever stop!

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