Gem Expo Classes Are UP!!!

Sign up soon! 8 students max in my classes. I have three classes to choose from running back-to-back on Saturday, November 26th, but there are many more on offer all weekend. Book your classes online.

A class would make a great Christmas gift, too. Come with a friend, plan a day at the show and then take yourselves out for a leisurely lunch or dinner before the Christmas/New Year's time crunch starts. Learn a great new skill, and make some new friends around the table.

Leather Wrap Bracelets: 
These are so easy-peasy: if you can tie a knot, you can make these bracelets. Bring your own beads (1mm+ holes) and coloured leather to supplement the black leather and beads in the class kit. Add length to the leather to make a necklace. These are super easy to make and because they are somewhat adjustable would make wonderful Christmas gifts for everyone. Dress them up or down.

Just a few of the endless possibilities:

Jewellery-Making Tips & Tricks for the 
Not-Quite-So-Beginner: 
When I started out making jewellery ten years ago, many people would ask me, "What are you working on these days?" I'd show them, and then they'd say, "Okay, then you need to know this." Now it's my turn to pass all those "thises" along.

This class will move really fast. Learn about different wire, tools and hammering techniques, crimping and stringing tips. Make your own earwires, decorative headpins, connectors and dangles in the class. Learn where you can save money for your customers. Bring your questions or a project that you'd like help with.

If you have a bench block and hammer, please bring them along with pliers and cutters. We will be working with copper wire of various gauges and tempers.

Totally Addicting Stretch Bracelets: 
Super quick and easy to make bracelets for kids and grownups to suit all tastes and budgets. Great for Christmas gift-giving.

If you buy beads to use in the Totally Addicting Stretch Bracelet class, make sure they have minimum 1mm holes to slightly larger. Stretch Magic cord is provided in the kit, and more will be available for sale. If you want to bring your own, make sure it's Stretch Magic, 1mm diameter.

If you have any questions about my classes, please email me for the quickest response.

Don't forget: book any class and you get free admission all three days of the show. Look forward to seeing you at The Gem Expo the last weekend in November!

Copper Curl Pendants...

One of my favourite sources for wire weaving tutorials is Oxana Crafts over on YouTube. I watched this tutorial yesterday, and then this morning at the market tried making it from memory. Let's just say that overdue library books aren't the only things I've not been remembering lately.

My first attempt was an epic FAIL, if for no other reason than I ran out of wire. The bead doesn't look very good with it, either -- white stripes, not blue like in the photo (blame that on my idiotPhone camera):

2nd attempt turned out the best -- it has two distinct layers of wire as one side tucks in behind. The copper looks good with the red glass:

3rd attempt is okay-ish... maybe:

Comparing mine with the original design here shows I really need to tighten up my twirls. My beads are a bit larger than the one used in the original video, and I found that 2 pieces of 30-inch 20 gauge gave me enough wire.

Well, that was interesting exercise... but definitely back to the drawing board. Do check out Oxana's tuts. They're very easy to follow.

I've been told the November Gem Expo classes will be posted later this weekend. Sign up at the Gem Expo website and you'll get an email notifying you as soon as they're up. Lots of fun classes and you get a three-day show pass with your class fee. Where? Downtown Toronto at the Hyatt Regency on King Street the last weekend in November.

Thanks for stopping by and see you at the bead show!

Fab news...

The Gem Expo in July was a total hoot, met lots of new and returning customers and friends -- and the class I taught went really well, so much so I plan to offer two or three different classes at the November Gem Expo. Stay tuned for advance announcements on that front, and I'll give you a heads up once the classes are posted. This time, though, the classes will be capped at 5 to maybe 8 students, so don't delay in registering. If we know far enough in advance that there is sufficient demand additional classes can be scheduled.

In fact, think about giving the gift of learning to a friend as an early Christmas present. There are jewellery-making classes at the show for every skill level and interest. You'll definitely make new friends and jewellery buddies in the classes, as well.

My fab news is this summer I sold the smaller copper swirl citrine pendant and the wire-woven Sleeping Beauty turquoise nugget ring. Then yesterday I sold the larger swirl citrine pendant.

Aaaand... three weeks ago I sold the double-sided dragon-skin/crackle agate Backside of the Moon pendant.

People who know me know that I am a big fan of more is more, which means my market tables are usually crammed with stuff. Well... the past few weeks I've been experimenting with putting on the table just one or a few items in a style instead of the five, ten, dozen or more that I have... and it seems to be working. There is breathing space now between each item and sales seem to have picked up. There might be a little of the "uh, oh -- there's only one left, I'd better buy it now" scarcity strategy going on, too... maybe.

We also got new lighting in the market building a few weeks ago thanks to a grant. Makes a HUGE difference, so much so that I don't have to put up spotlights all over my table. Instead of walking from sunlight into a dim and depressing building, it's like walking from sunlight into sunlight. It's quite spectacular, actually, and all the jewellery across the table looks ten times better instead of the spotlit puddles I had before.

This summer I acquired some really great crystals and unusually-shaped tumbled and raw semi-precious stones. I'll be posting pictures when I get them made up into pendants. Meanwhile, you can always contact me here or by email for special orders, and you can find me at the Woodstock Farmers Market every Saturday morning, 7:00 a.m. to 12:00.

As always, thanks for stopping by!

Finally completed: Backside of the Moon Wire-Woven Pendant...

Took a bit longer than I'd expected, but Saturday morning at the market I finished the pendant. I mentioned in the last post about moving that little bit of wire at the top of the pendant to wrap around the single wire coming out of the bead. I think it really cleaned up the piece.

What it looked like before, with too many waves and curls. Even with pendants, I still adhere to the old magical "3" used in design:

What it looks like now:

Note also that I tucked that single hammered curl on the right in much tighter: it's there, but not.

And the "front" side before, where you can see that weak (to my eye) wave effect pretty much emphasising the single bare wire coming up from the bead:

And after:

I'd considered making a woven bail looping into the top of the pendant, but it looked too busy, so I did end up using jump rings after all. I thought using three would spread any wear along those fine weaving wires. Also, using three jump rings echoes the three woven base wires of the pendant top, as well as the three curved and hammered wire ends.

I also discovered the hard way that you don't want to be hammering curls like that if there's any weaving in the way. About 1/4" of the weaving ended up breaking into tiny pieces and falling away.

I decided also that a plain black adjustable leather cord would work best, rather than a wider leather lace or even a copper chain. I for one get so caught up in the fine details while working that I lose sight of how the pendant will read at any distance.

This is naturally oxidising, by the way. If you are interested in buying this piece and want it patinaed, let me know. This pendant is for sale: $50 plus shipping & handling. Please contact me by email if you're interested.

You can see it in person at the Woodstock Farmers Market every Saturday morning from about 5:00 a.m. (when I get there) until noon -- the market officially opens at 7:00 if you're not an early bird. I'll (maybe) have this and many similar pendants for sale at The Gem Expo in Toronto at the Hyatt Regency on King Street Friday July 15th to Sunday July 17th.

Thanks for stopping by -- and see you at The Gem Expo!!! It's a great show with lots of classes, beads, finished jewellery and an immense amount of knowledge on offer.

Backside of the Moon Copper Wire-Woven Pendant...

...finally got back to it on Sunday while sitting at the Nostalgia Show & Sale and then finished it today. This is the pendant I started well before Christmas -- you can see above on the masthead how far I got. Then the proverbial shite hit the fan and life became a monstrous blur for several months. One foot in front of the other, and don't look down. Then six or eight weeks ago or so I got absolutely deluged with typing which only let up on Friday.

Last week I'd set up a table outside to sort items for the Nostalgia Show and decided to leave it up all summer. Truth is, I'm too lazy to take it down and heave it back into the house. Today I cleared off accrued tree spit and whatnot and finished that pendant... almost. It looks okay in my hand, but as soon as I edited the photos I saw it wasn't reading, and figured out what needs to be fixed. I'll do that tomorrow. Let it percolate overnight in case I see something else needs tweaking. Of course I'd completely forgotten what I'd planned for the bail... and now there isn't one. That's something else I have to sort out. I think jump rings might wear away at the fine weaving wires, but I like the simplicity of the pendant as it is now. I may just string it on soft leather lace as is.

My outdoor studio, complete with deer flies, the big black ones with festively coloured eyes that you don't feel landing, only when they bite. For some reason they were biting me through my clothes, not my skin, which I found very strange.

Last December's photo, and Sunday's progress:

On Sunday, I'd remembered that I wanted to do something like that double curl at the bottom of the pendant, but the rest? Boh. So I started weaving and entwining... What I was definitely mindful of was producing a fully reversible pendant (this being the nominal front).

The back...

NO POINTLESS TWIDDLES this time, please and thank you! I did get quite ruthless in the end and hacked away.

Now to work:

Worked on hammering those lovely and elegant curvy curves that I admire so much online. This is when an anvil comes in handy, versus a plain bench block.

These are the two sides finished. This was supposed to be the back; yet again it looks better than the front. Not sure about that single curl in the lower right area... might disappear that tomorrow, too, or at least curve it into that woven bit more tightly. It's a structural piece that locks the two sets of weaving together. .

A little overexposed, but this photo of the front shows off the bead quite nicely. See that kind of "wave" dipping across the top of the bead? That's going to be gone tomorrow. It will wrap around and hide the wire coming out of the bead and I hope make the overall design stronger.

I'll post the finished pendant tomorrow. Might even sort out a bail. Thanks for stopping by!

Old Jewellery Pictures from 2009...

I was looking for an old picture on my computer the other day and found a folder of pictures from 2009. I started making jewellery in 2008. Green? Hah -- I'd never even heard of a jump ring, let alone what it was for, but dove in the deep end and started making pendents out of PMC silver. But this isn't about PMC, but that I got into jewellery by hammering the snot out of stuff, not stringing. It was another, oh, three or four years at least before I strung my first necklace or bracelet.

The following year found me living way out in the country, surrounded by home garage mechanic businesses and farmer's fields noisy with ploughs, seeders and harvesters racketing around all the time. While I'd banged away a little bit in 2008 using an ancient cast iron vise as a bench block and my landlady's chewed-up old hammer, I started to really go at it in 2009. Boy, oh, boy, was this ever fun. And noisy. I bought a bench block and proper jeweller's hammer, but I still didn't have any clue what I was doing. It took me a long time to figure out wire tempers and gauges. Living in the middle of nowhere, there was no one to ask, and without the vocabulary I didn't know the keywords to find things in a pre-Pinterest online world. There was nothing in the pokey little local library, classes and bead stores were all at least an hour away and, of the people I'd met, none of them were into hammering at all.

Hard-tempered wire is really hard to hammer, especially the 14 gauge brass I was playing with at the time -- and I thought that was all there was. I'd figured out that Artistic Wire was useless for my purposes because of the coating splitting on me all the time. Tinned copper and Argentium silver became my go-to wires for a long time until I found copper at the hardware store.

I also didn't have a camera at that point and had to scan my jewellery, but here are a few pictures from those early days.

I never really bought or wore jewellery my whole life, and working at the kinds of jobs I'd always had, it wasn't practical, if not downright dangerous. It happened though that in 2008 I discovered that I really liked making it -- and people started to buy it. Sometimes I hadn't even finished a piece when it was sold, as happened here at a summer craft show in 2009. It was very slow and I was bored: after taking apart a pair of earrings I'd found earlier in the day in the local thrift store I started to make this necklace with the earring dangles. This girl stopped by and we started chatting. I showed her what was I was doing and how the hippie-wrapped aka "frost fence style" (all I knew how to do at the time) rough Arizona turquoise would sit surrounded by the curved wings created by the dangles. She asked if it was for sale. We agreed on a price, she paid and wandered off for 20 minutes while I finished putting it together.

Those curved machine-made dangles opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for me.

Around this time I became aware of the pink breast cancer ribbon symbol, and made my own version with my very, very first wire wrapping, which I'd just come across online. I recall I made variations of these earrings in brass and tinned copper and I think I still have one brass pair left. (Actually, going through the whole folder it's kind of scary to see how many things I still have hanging around here. Definitely long past time to cut them up and recycle the beads, bits and pieces.)

I produced yards of chains, miles of viking knit and mountains of clasps.

I'm just getting back to making chains as they go so well with the wire-weaving I'm doing now, ditto the vintage bead soup stuff I'm getting into. Yes, it's time-consuming to make chain, but so worth it using even a few inches at the front of a necklace. Finishing off with commercial chain around the back where nobody can see it keeps costs down.

Yesterday, I made a lot of figure eight links, intending to make a chain just with them, but felt the loops were too small/the wire too thick (18 gauge) for the effect I was after, and after some false starts, came up with this chain using the crossed ribbon design. Sent it to a friend who said it looked like a vertebrae. COOL!

Today I'll finish the vertebrae chain and time myself to see how long it takes to make so I can price it, and then start new iterations by varying the lengths/angles/curves of the "arms" to see what comes up. Looking at the pictures, I'm thinking these particular figure 8s are too prominent, so I'll try it with 20 gauge wire.

A blast from the past: at the Woodstock farmers market in late February 2009 with my hammered items and PMC flowers and leaves.

Thanks for stopping by!

Purple Moon: Wire-Woven Copper & Agate Pendant

This is where and how I work. Netflix most of the time and always keeping an eye on the squirrels, chipmunks, birds and weather outside in the lilac tree. This is Ripper Street. Love the BBC!

I've liked the look of the various chevron and sunburst weaves I've seen on Pinterest, so two days ago, I wove three or four inches using 18 gauge and 28 gauge copper wire. 

Yesterday, I sorted through my bag of assorted pendants, picked out a large randomly faceted rainforest agate because I wanted to work on forming angles -- but the hole was too small. Rule number one? Always check to make sure the wire will go through the hole before you start to weave.

I picked this large round dyed crackle agate pendant only because the wire fits through the hole and which under normal light looks kinda meh.

But hit it with the right light -- there's a whole 'nother world happening inside this magical stone.

Here I've started wire wrapping the bottom two wire weaves on the left, and what will likely become the bail on the right. 

Uh oh... wait a sec. With fresh eyes studying the picture here on the blog as I'm writing I'm thinking maybe I should have incorporated the wire coming up through the pendant to do the bail... Hmm-mmm-mmmm. But there are still two free wires at the top... maybe I'll make those the bail with the pendant wire. 

As you now see, I never have any idea what I'm doing or where I'm going with something (and don't really care, either).

Unfortunately, we'll all have to wait to see what happens next, because it looks like some transcription just came flying through the virtual transom. Gotta go now. 

TTFN and thanks for stopping by!