Lauren Grace Jewellery

Shiny Moustaches

2012-02-10T05:05:00.000-08:00

You've been asking for them, and here they are! (Well, almost...)

Ever since I made a pair of custom moustache wedding rings way back in 2010, I've been meaning to make more things with this little moustache design as they're so cute!

I've had a moustache charm here on my website since its launch, which has been pretty popular, but I also fancy making some earrings and rings and maybe some cufflinks and anything else I can think of putting moustaches on!

Recently I've been getting a ton of requests for more silver moustache jewellery (it's weirdly been one of the top search terms on my website for the past year or so). So, I'm finally getting off my bum and making some more things with the designs that have been living in my sketchbook forever!

Here's a couple of work in progress shots of my moustache castings - the finished shiny moustaches should be ready for photographing soon....

Check back soon for more moustaches!

Personalised Roller Derby Jewellery

2012-01-31T12:08:00.000-08:00

Having had a fair few emails recently about personalising my derby skate necklaces with skaters' numbers and team colours, I thought I'd create a whole new page on my website with different options available.

And here it is!

http://www.laurengrace.co.uk/#/roller-derby-jewellery-persona/4557712272

You can pick your number, let me know what font you'd like and I'll make it in shiny silver for you.

Also, you can add semi-precious gemstones in your league or team colours. Like this:

Or indeed this:

Exciting, no?

Christmas Commissions and a Tiny Gold Bee

2011-12-31T04:56:00.000-08:00

I've rather got into the habit of making my boss a little gold charm for her charm bracelet each Christmas - hopefully she'll let me know when she's got quite enough on there and would rather have a pair of earrings!

I was torn this year between making a tiny raincloud and a tiny gold bee charm, but my room mates at work unanimously voted for the bee. It actually looked great cast in gold - I rarely wear gold but am tempted to make a gold mini bee necklace for myself!

I didn't have time to drag all my studio lights down from the mezzanine, so I just took a couple of shots with my 18-55 kit lens and pop up flash. I see now why jewellery photographers never use flash - the pictures are horrid! But anyway, they give an idea of what the bee looks like in gold, so here they are:

I also had a commission from another lady at work to make a silver spike bracelet, similar to one on my website, but with amethyst stones instead of sapphire. Here's the original:

And the version with amethyst:

Again, rubbish photography I'm afraid, but I was rather pleased with the way the bracelet turned out.

I've had a few days rest from jewellery now (even put some false nails on - never again! How do people with long nails cope with life...?) so ready to get back to the bench and work on some new stuff.

Festive Baking

2011-12-18T19:08:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling pretty smug about my festive baking, especially given that I baked not so much as a single cupcake last Christmas.

I wanted to take some treats into work instead of giving out cards, so I thought mini Christmas cakes and mince pies would be easiest.

I needed a simple but cute way of decorating them, as I've done fully iced mini cakes before and they took FOREVER! So, I decided to take inspiration from childhood memories of Mum's eternal battle with Christmas cake icing. Royal icing was mixed, pallet knives dunked in hot water, but the icing always remained resolutely not flat. It would invariably end up being whipped into peaks with a teaspoon, with mum cheerfully proclaiming it snow, before adding ceramic santas, sleighs and snowmen.

I decided on snow with a little piped icing Christmas tree and some little sugar snowflakes.

So, here is my tiny icing forest. I made them with a piping bag, open star tip and royal icing, then added tiny silver sugar balls. My flat is bloody freezing, so they took about 2 days to harden!

I used a normal Christmas cake recipe, which called for cooking in the oven at 120 degrees for 3 hours, and after some experimentation (and charring...) worked out that 120 degrees for about 20-25 minutes was about right.

So, here are my tiny Christmas cakes, marzipanned and decorated with Mum's snow icing :)

And on to the mince pies!

Thanks again to Mum for the recipe, which makes the best mince pie pastry ever, with lemon rind and cream cheese. Here it is, if you're interested:

175g (6oz) butter
175g cream cheese (I used Sainsbury's marscapone)
rind of 1 lemon
250g (9oz) plain flour
2 tsp icing sugar (I accidentally added 2 tbsp and it was still fine!)
pinch of salt

Beat together butter (softened works best) and cream cheese.
Grate in lemon rind.
Add flour, icing sugar and salt
Mix till it forms a soft dough (I used the dough hooks on my hand mixer, which worked great)
Chill in fridge for 30 minutes

I find the dough is a little bit of a nightmare to work with - I have a silicone rolling mat and a silicone rolling pin and still need to add flour when rolling out. But yes, just roll it out to an acceptable pastry thickness (1-2mm ish?), cut out bases, and put in greased shallow bun trays. Add a teaspoon of mincemeat to each (the boy persuaded me to add more and, foolishly, I gave in, but the little pies overflowed a bit), then cut out tops in whatever shapes you fancy. Mum does stars, but I couldn't find my star cutter so mine ended up with snowflakes.

Give them a glaze with some beaten egg, then put in the oven at 190 degrees for 10-15 minutes. Mum says 15, but my oven is mental so they only took 10.

Remove from oven, admire, attempt to stop boy from eating them whilst still molten, and you're done. If you want to be fancy, dust them with a sprinkling of icing sugar before serving.

Here they are before they went into the oven, but I totally forgot to take a picture when they came out all golden and bubbly!

And that was my festive baking. Thanks Mum for the recipes and inspiration!

My shopping is mainly done, my jewellery orders are up to date, so all that's left is to wish you all a lovely Christmas.

X

Oh Hi There December

2011-12-11T01:46:00.000-08:00

December last year was so much chaos, I put in place much earlier cut off times for Christmas orders this year and have been way more organised.

I've even put up some decorations, which was quite exciting. Last year's festive decor involved half heartedly hanging some sparkly penguins in the window and that was about it! This year we have a very small tree. It's a compromise because I wanted a fake tree, as I think it's really sad every January when you see the piles of dying trees lying on the street waiting for the recycling, but the boy wanted a real one. So, we have a tiny 2 foot high tree, in a pot, which we will give to a friend after Christmas to look after, as I am rubbish with plants at the best of times and the likelihood of me keeping an outdoor tree alive in the flat is nil.

So, here's my little tree with some tiny lights:

And with some sparkly, and slightly bonkers, baubles:

I've even had time to do some festive baking, more of which later...

Queen Bee Necklace

2011-11-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

It would appear that I may have become a little obsessed with shiny silver bees. Having made my mini-bees into things, I also decided what my big bee needed was a tiny crown. Thus making her into a Queen Bee, see?

Check her out!

That’s pretty cute, right? Look at her little face!

So, I’ve now got my silver bumble bees available in baby bee, large bee and queen bee necklaces, bracelets and earrings, hurrah! They’re all now buzzing about on my website here, just waiting for you to admire them (especially the queen, she’s a bit of a show-off that one...)

Am Still Baking Genius By the Way...

2011-11-18T06:23:00.000-08:00

So, for all of you that said about my marvellous bread maker "Oh, you'll never use it/it'll just sit in the cupboard/you'll get bored/blah blah blah", all I can say is....

.... behold my loaf!

It's an apple and cider loaf, hence the arty placement of some apples and cider bottle in shot (yes, I've been playing with my camera...). The recipe came from a really cool book called the Ultimate Bread Machine Cookbook by Jennie Shapter. I've made a few from there now, but my favourites so far have been an ale and grain mustard one, and a rye and seed loaf.

So go, buy it. Bake bread. It's great!

Silver Baby Bees!

2011-11-17T06:21:00.000-08:00

Having got far too excited about my little silver bumblebee necklace, I decided it needed a little baby bee companion so I could make earrings too. I mean, I could have made earrings out of the first bee but she is, to be honest, a little bit of a fatty (but shhhhhh, don’t tell her I said that...) and thus too heavy for ear dangling.

So, back to the wax carving, hurrah! The carving bit is actually kind of therapeutic and I again managed to lose a whole weekend happily pottering about with my pointy dental tools and bits of wax.

I didn’t take any work in progress pictures this time, as I followed basically the same process as last time, only smaller. Trying to get the detail on the wings of this one made my eyes go a bit squiffy though.

So without further ado, here is my mini bee in silver.

And a small herd of bees...

Some earrings...

And a bracelet.

I think my silver bees may be my new favourite thing that I’ve made - the big bee necklace has even taken over from my shiny skate as the piece of jewellery I wear most days.

My bees are now up for sale on my website, so I hope you guys think they’re as cute as I do!

I Am Now Official

2011-10-25T05:16:00.000-07:00

After using third party services and borrowing other people's hallmarks for the past couple of years, I have finally taken the plunge and registered my own maker's mark with Goldsmiths Hall in London.

It's actually all very exciting (no really, it is...) and I can now have all my jewellery hallmarked and stamped with my very own and completely unique initial/shieldy type thing.

Hurrah!

In other goings on, I have been halted in my quest to finish new shiny things, as the oxygen tank on my blow torch ran out of puff. Just waiting for a new one to turn up and then I can Get Stuff Done.

Sparkly Things!

2011-10-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

Hello!

So, I've not updated this in a while, as I keep forgetting to take pictures of stuff. I shall now, however, tell you what I've been up to.

Firstly, I have mainly been making skate necklaces. I had so many orders I ended up with an actual waiting list. Check me out with my exclusive jewellery pieces! I have to say they are rather a pain in the bum to make, and I could quite cheerfully never look at one again.

I've also been making new stuff though, which is quite exciting. I sent off my little pieces to a new mould maker I'm trying out, and I now have a little pile of vintage wallpaper inspired swirly things.

I also managed to spend a quite alarming amount of money at the IJL show at Earls Court at the beginning of this month. I've been there every year since college and I think this is the first time I've ever turned up with purpose and actually knowing what I wanted. Managed to come back with a lovely haul of sparkly things.

Also bumped into my old college tutor, Brian, which was really nice. Am always amazed at the ability of tutors to remember their students, even years later!

So, that's what I've been up to. My plan for the next few weeks is to finalise my new stuff, make a tiny crown for my bumble bee (which is going to be very cute), take more photographs and update the website. Oh, and make more skate necklaces...

I Made a Bee!

2011-08-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

So, I’ve been meaning to have a go at wax carving for ages, but have instead been doing that procrastination thing that I do, as my one experience of wax carving at college forever ago did not go terribly well. I made a squiggle. It wasn’t even a very good squiggle.

Anyway, the UKJC forum that I belong to were having another charm swap so I figured that was the perfect excuse to try out a new technique. The theme of the swap was summer, which always makes me think of hanging out in my grandmother’s garden by the sea as a child, the smell of lavender and big fluffy bumble bees buzzing around. I figured a bee is a lot like a little fluffy ball and therefore a fairly simple shape to carve for my first project. Also, bees are awesome.

See?

And is this not the cutest bee ever? It looks all asleep, bless (original photograph here).

I wanted my little bee to be obviously bee-like, but also kind of cartoony and cute rather than anatomically correct. Not entirely sure anatomically is the right word to use for bugs... Whatever.

Anyway, one of my favourite fabrics, Chloe's Imagination by Tina Givens, has lovely bees on it, so I wanted my bee to look kind of like this:

I actually made a little hat out of this fabric ages ago:

I also like the bee that lives on Patron Tequilla bottles, so wanted to make a silver version inspired by these:

So, I got me a block of wax and excavated the set of wax carving tools that I optimistically purchased a year or so ago from the depths of my toolbox. Then drew a bee. Then stared at the little wax block for a while. Unfortunately, my brain does not work well in 3D. I see the picture of the bee, I see the bee in my head as a little fluffy ball, but I have no idea how to make one become the other.

Eventually I gave myself a good talking to and just got on with it.

I started off by hacking off bits of wax until it was vaguely bee shaped:

I left the bee drawing on the wax and started removing wax from the underside. When deciding that the bee was simply a fluffy ball and therefore easy to carve, I somehow neglected to take into account the wings. Oops.

I got a bit absorbed in the carving (and developed several blisters on my fingers from the carving tools) so forgot to take any pictures of the inbetween stages, but here I've started work on the top of the bee, shaping the body more and trying to make my poor little brain deal with the wing element.

Starting to add the stripes and wing detail here:

Then adding texture to the body to try and make it appear a bit fluffy:

The wings were the last thing to finish, as they were the most delicate bit - was so scared I was going to snap them and ruin a whole weekend's work...

And we're done!

Off to the caster to have the wax turned into silver, and here's my little bee:

I love her little face and big googly eyes :)

Didn't have time to take many pictures, as it was late and I failed to notice I had my ISO level set to, like, 6400 or something ridiculous, so the pictures weren't coming out well. I'll take some more when I get more little bees cast from my mould.

Lovely Customers

2011-06-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

I find it very difficult to let my shiny things go once I’ve made them. I spend hours cutting, carving, sanding, polishing, only to package up my glittery little creations and send them out into the big wide world, to be owned by other people.

So, it’s brilliant when you get an email from a customer saying that they’ve received a shiny thing from you and telling you how much they love it :)

I came into work on a dark and rainy Friday morning to find a lovely email from a customer in America telling me how happy he was with the little silver moustache charm he had ordered from me. It brightened by day rather a lot. He even sent me a picture of himself wearing it and kindly gave me permission to use it here.

Meet Scott:

Awesome moustache, I think you’ll agree.

Scott makes some rather nice pictures, also occasionally featuring moustaches, which can be seen here:

http://www.scottwrightart.com

In other news, I sold a silver cloud necklace and have a commission for a new name necklace, which I really like doing, so all is currently good in the world of shiny things. Which is nice.

Models!

2011-06-16T11:06:00.000-07:00

One of the questions I am most commonly asked by visitors to my website is "...but do you have any pictures of it being worn..?" This is definitely something I need to work on for my site.

A few weeks ago, a friend I skate with at rec league asked if anyone was interested in helping out at a photoshoot for a very cool book she's doing on roller derby fashion. I offered my services as photography assistant in the hope that I could (a) learn some stuff about photography and (b) sneak my jewellery into some shots.

And here are the results:

I think they turned out really well. The jewellery isn't super-clear, as necklaces have a tendancy to move around a bit, but you definitely get the idea of what the jewellery looks like on, right?

Many thanks to Ellen for letting me hijack her shoot, to http://www.dannybournephotography.co.uk/ for the pictures and the patience, and to my gorgeous rollergirl models, Anna, Danelle and Erin.

A Week of Cats and Cake

2011-06-13T10:07:00.000-07:00

I have, as ever, been just a little bit rushed off my feet recently. People are buying my jewellery, which is lovely, and I very much wish I had more time to make new shiny things.

Rather excitingly, I sold some non-roller derby things too.

A little cloud necklace:

And a tiny moustache charm, to a lovely artist.

Helpfully, it turns out that I am no longer invisible to Google, hurrah! When I built my website, I used a flash based program, which looks very pretty and all, but is picture based and has no text for Google’s little spiders to crawl. Aha, I thought! I shall be clever and put titles in white text against my white background so Google has something to find, but so they don’t show up and ruin my pretty pages. Have since discovered, however, that Google frowns upon such things, considering them sneaky and suspicious, and therefore ignores the websites.

So, I spent ages going through my website, removing all my secret headings and using something called Alt-tags to create a text version of my title pictures and everything else. And, it worked! I’m now getting a regular stream of hits on my website with a whole range of search terms. Oddly, my most popular is “Essex necklace”, closely followed by “moustache jewellery”.

I’ve had loads of requests recently to sell the silver AFI necklaces I’ve blogged about previously, but have turned them all down, as the artwork belongs to the band, and not to me.

I’ve also had a few requests for commissions, but nothing that’s been finalised as yet. Fingers crossed for something fun...

Anyway, back to the title of this post, I’ve been away at home for a few days. It was really nice to see my family and have a bit of a rest. And cake. I did eat an awful lot of cake. Also got to visit my godmother, June, whom I’ve not seen in forever, and her beautiful Birman cat – check her out:

And here’s my mum’s gorgeous but grumpy little kitty, Pudding:

I was a little bit naughty when I was at home and bought a new camera. “Another one?!” I hear you cry... Yes, I know I only bought one last year, but that one was purchased on rather a whim and didn’t really do what I wanted it to for the jewellery photography, so I’ve now bought a lovely SLR, which is what I should have got in the first place! Went for a Canon EOS 550d. Had a bit of a play with it just in point and shoot mode and here’s some of the results. Nice, no?

Now, I just need to learn how to use it properly. Have ordered a book, which was recommended by a proper photographer and everything.

Right, enough of my wittering. Off to poke bits of metal with sharp things now.

Oooh, A Feature...

2011-05-18T05:22:00.000-07:00

So, the lovely Jayne from Guilded Gems has done a little feature on my shiny weather. Exciting, no?

Check it out here: http://www.guildedgems.co.uk/index.php/news/25-jewellery-trends/64-april-showers

In other news, I completely failed to attend the Liberty Open Call, as I hadn't finished any of the new shiny things I wanted to, hadn't gotten my hallmarking sorted, and hadn't even thought about my presentation. Which was rubbish. But... they are doing another one in August, hurrah! Which I absolutely WILL be ready for.

Commissions, Cupcakes and Cuba

2011-05-13T14:34:00.000-07:00

I've not had a chance to post for a while, due to being crazy busy in the couple of weeks leading up to my lovely holiday in the sun (more of which later).

Had a nice commission from the husband of a rollergirl for one of my winged skate necklaces, customised with her skate number. I've not had much of a chance to saw things from silver sheet with tiny blades for a while, so creating the little 9 made me happy.

Didn't have time to take proper pictures, but took a couple of (slighly blurry) snaps.

Also, I've not made any cupcakes for ages, so created some vaguely royal wedding themed ones in red, white and blue and took them into work. The boy came home as I was merrily pottering around the kitchen with icing and glitter and commented that I'm always so happy when I'm creating things. Usually a mess!

Anyway, here they are:

Had a bit of a horrid last day at work trying to get everything finished before going on holiday and ended up in the office until gone 8pm! Boooooo. But a lovely time in the glorious Cuban sunshine perked me up no end. We spent a few days in Havana, which was beautiful, fascinating and chaotic in equal measures, then on to Varadero for a few more days on the most gorgeous beach. Think I finally relaxed and slept properly for the first time in about two years!

I took a ton of photographs, but I don't want to bore you all rigid with my holiday snaps, so here's just a couple of my favourites:

Now, back to reality and back to the workbench. Many shiny things need finishing before the Liberty open call in August.

I Has a Website...

2011-05-13T09:29:00.000-07:00

I have FINALLY finished my website, hurrah!!! Well, when I say finished, it's as complete as it's going to get till I finish the shiny things currently skulking grumpily on my workbench.

And here it is:

Pretty, isn't it? Although, knowing nothing about web design, I did make it full of lovely pictures, and consequently it is a little slow to load, so please be patient with it.

You can find it at http://www.laurengrace.co.uk/

Oooh, and I also made a facebook page - see?

I have fans and everything. Come and like my page at http://www.facebook.com/laurengracejewellery and then I can have more :)

P90X Update

2011-03-24T04:20:00.001-07:00

Hello again,

Had a little bit of a blog break there, as have been ridiculously busy. P90X has not fallen by the wayside, but I’m definitely no longer on the day I’m supposed to be on, as I’ve had to abandon several days worth of workouts due to random and fun things, such as theatre trips, drinks with friends and roller derby practice.

So, let’s say I’m now on Day 17, even though it’s been more days than that since I started, and last week I definitely did not Bring It. Sorry Tony.

This week, however, I’m totally bringing it. Day 15 was the shoulders and arms workout, aka the horrid one with all the push ups and pull ups. Felt like I really pushed it though and am doing 2 extra reps on each round, hurrah. Arms felt somewhat like jelly afterwards though, and made cutting out silver with miniscule sawblades a bit tricky.

Day 16 was plyometrics, which I also pushed harder this week. This one is still completely exhausting, but all the leaping about and occasionally pretending to be a frog is fun.

Then, Day 17 was shoulders and arms. I have finally acquired some heavier weights, but rather over-ambitiously attempted to go from 3kg weights to 7kg. This, as it turns out, was quite foolish, as I couldn’t even lift them above my head. Pathetic. So, I switched down to 5kg, which was much better. I can do 8-10 reps with these, and my arms hurt rather a lot afterwards. But not in a bad, oooh, I’ve done some damage, kind of way.

So yes, still going, still detest the Ab Ripper workout, still hoping to one day be able to do a proper pull up. And it’s yoga tonight, which is my favourite, hurrah!

Some Jewellery!

2011-03-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

What with all this waffling on about push ups and power yoga, you could be forgiven for thinking that I have abandoned shiny things. This is not so, and I shall give you a picture of work in progress to prove it.

P90X - Days 9 and 10

2011-03-03T05:08:00.000-08:00

Since beginning P90X, I have gained 2lb. I am sure this is not the purpose of the program, but I have merrily ignored the large book of nutritional plans that came with it. Firstly, because I don't actually want to lose any weight and secondly because the recipes involve strange American things that I'm pretty sure are not stocked in Sainsburys, and weighing bits of food. I'm not a weighing bits of food kind of girl. Life is very much too short for that sort of thing.

I have, however, conceded that I should probably eat more protein and less cake. I have so far purchased a bag of nuts and a tub of protein powder from Holland & Barrett, which has remained unopened and glaring balefully at me from the corner of the kitchen. It has strange things listed in the ingredients and I'm a bit scared of it. I'm working my way up to trying it, really I am...

Day 9

Well, I can say with absolute conviction that doing plyometrics whilst wearing my new and exciting bouncy running shoes is much less painful. Plyo day is still exhausing, yet fun, but my feet and ankles are much less grouchy about the whole experience.

Day 10

Woohoo, I can still walk! The last time I did plyo, my calf muscles were agony for days. Today, they ache slightly, but that's it. Note to self - when the instructions say wear suitable footwear for high impact - pay attention.

It's the arm workout today. I still haven't gotten any heavier weights. Drat.

Tomorrow is Yoga X, which is still so far my favourite.

P90X - Days 7 and 8

2011-03-01T05:05:00.000-08:00

Alrighty then, back to the ongoing struggle that is currently my life. Did that sound a bit drama-queeny? I'm having a bit of a horrid week, you see, so must be forgiven for being a bit emo.

Anyway, I've messed up all the days a bit on P90X, as I had a rest day when I shouldn't have, owing to being unable to actually move, so I think technically day 7 should have been the rest day, but whatever.

Day 7

Today is Kenpo X, which I've been quite looking forward to, as it sounds like fun. It's a martial arts/kickboxy kind of cardio workout. Involving absolutely no use of a pull up bar, yay!

It starts off fairly slowly, with some footwork and basic punching, which is all good. However, as soon as it gets a bit more complicated I am instantly transported back in time to the teenage nightmare that was our step aerobics P.E. class. Doing the foot bit is fine, but as soon as I attempt to put in the different punching sequences I lose control of my feet, and vice versa. Tony is enthusiastically yelling "jab, uppercut, punch", as I flail my arms around ineffectually and try not to fall over. The boy plugs himself into Civilisation and puts his headphones on, as apparently it's too painful to watch.

I'm a bit better at the kicking sequences, as they seem to require less co-ordination from me and by the end of the DVD I am slowly getting the hang of it. Although there is still a large amount of arm flailing. I do work up a sweat, however, so the cardio bit of it has done it's job. I may watch the punching sequences in slow motion, in the hope that something clicks in my fluffy little brain.

Day 8

And.... we're back to the beginning. With the pull up bar and all the push ups. Joy. I manage to do two extra push ups on each round though, which was exciting. Also, I swapped my pull up assisting chair for a high stool, as on the DVD they put their foot on the back of the chair rather than the seat. If I use the back of my chairs though, they fall over and I collapse in a crumpled heap on the floor. Using the higher stool made the pull ups more difficult and I could do less reps for each exercise, but felt like I was in a better position and getting more out of them.

This workout completely battered my arms and shoulders for two days the first time I did it, so intrigued as to whether it will be less painful this time around...

Graham & Green Pineapple Lamp

2011-02-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

So, this getting fit and healthy thing is all very well, but it is sadly lacking in pretty pictures. Therefore, I shall introduce you to the latest object of my affections - the pineapple lamp from Graham and Green. Tada!

It is rather lovely, in an agreeably ridiculous way, no?

Sadly, it's also £95. And it turns out that's just for the base - the gorgeous butterfly shade that goes so perfectly with the bonkers silver pineapple costs extra. Booooo. I am still considering purchasing it though, but shhhhhh, don't tell the boy...

P90X - Days Four, Five and Six

2011-02-27T02:07:00.001-08:00

Having failed entirely at Day 3, am now a day behind. Ooops. Not a terribly good start really...

Anyway, on with the review!

Day 4

Day 4 is entitled Shoulders and Arms, leading me to dread the reappearance of the evil pull up bar. But no! This workout only uses dumbbells and a chair, hurrah! I mainly find this one pretty easy. Which obvs means my 3kg dumbbells are way too light and am therefore cheating. Tony says you should be about to do between 8 and 15 reps, and the last two should be really hard, but I can get up to 20 reps on most of the exercises with no problems. Must get heavier ones...

Sadly, another round of Ab-Ripper X follows this. Boooooo. I still can't balance on my bum without falling over.

Day 5

Today, my calf muscles STILL hurt from the plyometrics. which was days ago now. Suspect doing it barefoot rather than wearing some kind of impact absorbing footwear was not a good idea. Unexpectedly, my arms also ache a bit from yesterday's workout, so I guess even my little dumbbells had some effect.

So, today is Yoga X, which I'm super-excited about. I really like yoga. And, the boy has agreed to do this DVD with me. Have bought him a yoga mat and everything, as I'm nice like that.

Yoga X is 90 minutes long, with the first 45 minutes being very intensive and exhausting and the second 45 minutes all about balance and calm. Am gratified to discover that my body seems to remember some of the 8 months of power yoga classes I took about 6 years ago. I'm very much liking Yoga X.

Sadly, the boy likes Yoga X a lot less than me. He had neglected to mention beforehand that not only has he never done yoga in his life, he's never even done stretching exercises pre and post workout, and this DVD is most definitely not Yoga 101. Anyway, about 20 minutes in the boy gives up and wanders off, muttering disparaging things about Tony. He then proceeds to sulkily clatter pots and pans around the kitchen during the peaceful/calming bit of the workout.

So far, Yoga X is absolutely my favourite of the P90X workouts. My calf muscles feel much, much better and I can do stairs again, yay!

Day 6

It's Legs and Back today. This involves the pull up bar. Arse. Have learned that I could not do a pull up without putting one foot on a chair if my life actually depended on it.

This one involves lots of lunges, squats and pull ups. There is a particularly horrid thing called a wall squat, which hurts rather a lot.

Not really much else to say about this one. It's pretty tiring, but I neither love it nor hate it particularly. It is, however, followed by another round of the Ab Ripper X, which I do hate. I can't do a full sit up and I still keep toppling over. I may spent a few minutes at the end of each workout simply trying to balance on my bum with my arms and legs out.

So, that's all for now. All of my muscles are aching, but in a good way rather than the pain of the first couple of days, and I'm feeling generally more energised.

The P90X Workout

2011-02-21T10:54:00.000-08:00

In a moment of madness, I have decided to take part in a potentially suicidal fitness program, called P90X.

It comprises 12 different DVDs, each with a different workout on, and it’s supposed to make you super-fit in 90 days.

The blurb from the website:

"The secret behind the P90X system is an advanced training technique called Muscle Confusion™, which accelerates the results process by constantly introducing new moves and routines so your body never plateaus, and you never get bored!"

So, found the program on Ebay, acquired myself a pull up bar and yoga mat, and rescued my ancient set of dumbbells (purchased many years ago when I last decided I was going to get fit) from the attic of my old house.

I should point out at this stage that, whilst I am not a total couch potato, I am definitely in no way fit. I’m only little, but I’ve been reading a lot lately about how being skinny does not necessarily mean you are healthy.

I spend my day at work sitting at a desk. In fact we are actively discouraged from leaving our desks unless absolutely necessary. Then I go home and sit at my workbench. I do cycle to and from work most days, but I really don’t put a lot of effort into it to be honest. So, in conclusion, P90X may not be designed for the likes of me, given that it does seem to assume a fairly good level of fitness before you start.

Anyway, I thought I’d blog my experience with it, as (a) it will probably shame me into keeping going and (b) it may be interesting to see if a small, mainly vegetarian girl can get herself some guns!

Day 1

Day 1 is called Chest and Back. Followed by something called Ab Ripper X.

Chest and back is basically 50-odd minutes of different types of push ups, pull ups and dumbbell lifting. My dumbbells are 3 kilos each, which, I discover, is much too light for the purposes of this DVD, but I’m sticking with them for now and just doing extra reps.

The guy who will, to all intents and purposes, be your personal trainer throughout these DVDs, Tony, is actually not too irritating. He has very large muscles and is terribly enthusiastic about everything.

I discover that I am incapable of doing a single pull up, but that's okay, because Tony says I'm allowed to put one foot on a chair until I'm strong enough to do them properly, hurrah!

During the workouts, Tony suggests you write down the amount of reps you do on each thingy, so you can aim to do a little more next time. This is fine at the beginning of the 50-odd minutes and my notes are rather neat, but by the end of the DVD I can no longer move my arms properly and it therefore turns into illegible scrawl.

This is hard.

The Ab Ripper X (grrrrrrrrrr) is my idea of hell. There is a lot of balancing on your butt cheeks with your legs and arms raised. This generally makes me fall over. A lot. I am completely hopeless at this DVD. The boy made encouraging noises about it just needing practice, but I have absolutely no sense of balance and am therefore unsure about this.

Day 2

I wake up. My arms hurt. A lot. And my ribs feel like someone has punched me very hard. But today is plyometrics, yay! This is something I’ve been meaning to have a go at for ages, as it’s apparently really helpful for roller derby. It involves a lot of jumping designed to produce fast, powerful movements.

This is another 50-odd minute DVD. And it’s brilliant fun! I jump, I leap, I pretend to be a frog and I love it. I rather suspect the people who live in the flat under me love it a lot less. You are supposed to land super-quietly on the balls of your feet, but I own no trainers and am prone to generally being a bit stompy. Especially for one so small.

Anyway, the DVD finishes and I am unable to feel my legs. Sadly, the numbness does not continue and my legs start to gradually ache more and more.

Day 3

Ouch.

Walking is difficult. And painful. I like plyometrics a lot less today. Especially when I have to walk down stairs. Stairs really really hurt.

I am supposed to skating at rec league this evening, so I cycle to work with all of my skate gear. It is somewhat of a struggle.

I lurch down the corridors of my office like a small, grumpy zombie and am for once grateful of my firm’s policy of keeping us chained to our desks.

I’m afraid that Day 3 is going to be a big, fat fail. I have developed a vile headache half way through the day and think the likelihood of me cycling to Bermondsey, playing roller derby for two hours, then cycling all the way home again is exactly nil.

Sorry Tony, but today I am definitely not ‘bringing it’.

Experiments with Foil

2011-02-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I briefly introduced you to my shiny new custom boxes as part of my yearly review, but now I shall go into a little more detail, in order to review some hot foiling pens.

So, basically, the fancy box making company couldn’t do exactly what I wanted. This is because I am often a pain in the bum and want something different and exciting and terribly complicated. I wanted the heart design that I use for my website background and business cards printed onto the top of the charcoal grey boxes, but I also wanted a metallic gold keyhole printed onto the front of the boxes where they close. Sadly, the only way they could do this was to entirely custom make the boxes, rather than just printing on off the shelf ones. And what would be the problem with this, you may wonder..? Well, that would be the minimum order of 3,000 boxes. Eek! As I don’t think I will sell enough jewellery to need 3,000 boxes in my entire life, this wasn’t really an option.

So, I had my customary “how hard can it be...?” thoughts about printing my own little keyhole on the front, after the fancy box designers had done their thing with the top of the boxes. Here are my naked boxes, bereft of their little keyholes. Still pretty, but a little bit sad, no?

Anyway, if you are at all familiar with my crafty projects, you will have an idea of how well these things that my little brain decides will be super-easy usually go.

I did a bit of research on hot foiling. Apparently people who make cards use it a lot. The catch is, however, that they print the hot foil onto a design on the cards that has been printed on a laser printer. Now, (a) obvs I can’t put a box in a printer, and (b), laser toner won’t show up on the black boxes anyway. Bum. A little more research showed me the apparent wonders of foiling pens. And here is how they worked out.

1. Tonertex Write & Rub Pen

This is a pen filled with a special type of glue. You write/draw on the thing you want to foil with it. The glue comes out a kind of milky white colour, then you wait for it to dry clear. Like so:

Then, you just rub the special foil onto the dried glue with your finger.

It does make it shiny, but as you can see it's not really the right method for getting the neat finish I'm after. The glue is very runny and the nib isn't particularly fine, so getting sharp edges and corners are impossible.

Right, next.
2. Battery Operated Hot Foil Pen

This seemed good in theory. It has a rounded plastic nib, which contains a heated element, and you write directly onto the shiny side of the foil with it.

I started off by making a template, so my edges would be neat. Like this:

Then, placed the foil on the box, placed the template over it and heated up the pen.

I have to say, the results weren't so great. Firstly, you have to hold down the little button on the side of the pen whilst you're working, which is kind of awkward. Also, it turns out all colours of foil are not created equal. The gold, for example, is rubbish! It comes out all patchy, no matter how hard you rub over it with the pen. See?

The silver turned out pretty nice:

Having abandoned the gold, the silver is what I ended up using on the boxes I had to send out to customers, as with the template it looked pretty neat.

Just out of curiosity really, I tried all the different colours of foil and gold was definitely the worst.

Anyway, even though the silver turned out pretty nice, I still really wanted the keyhole to be gold.

Having given up on this foiling nonsense as too unpredictable, I purchased a sheet of shiny gold vinyl sheet, cut out my little keyhole with a scalpel, and stuck it to the front of the box, using the battery hot foil pen (switched off) to rub over it, as I liked the effect it gave with the foil of kind of embossing it into the stripes on the box. This worked perfectly and gave me the perfect little shiny keyhole I was after. Hurrah!

Ooooh, Published!

2011-02-03T04:56:00.000-08:00

I meant to write about this a couple of weeks ago, but in all the busyness of January, I forgot.

I was contacted by lovely Jayne of the Guild of Jewellery Designers, asking if I would be happy for my silver skate charm that I've been working on to be the subject of an article on their website, showing the process from inspiration and design through to the finished piece. Of course, I was indeed happy!

So, it can be found here (although my website is not yet finished, so you can't buy them yet!):

http://www.guildofjewellerydesigners.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=890:shiny-roller-skates&catid=35:general-news&Itemid=61

Words mainly by me, with a couple of tweaks from Jayne.

So there you go, my first ever article. Exciting, no?

In other news, my lovely friend Richard is visiting from L.A. next week. This makes me very happy, as it's been far too long.

Am Still Baking Genius

2011-02-02T00:51:00.000-08:00

I must confess, I am having rather a lot of fun with my new bread maker. I am so very rock and roll...

It was with some trepidation that I attempted a granary loaf, having been told they can be a bit hit and miss in bread makers, but look...

How marvellous! A perfect loaf of bread with bits in.

On a roll now, I then had a bash at rye bread, as the machine comes with a special knobbly blade thingy with which to make rye type things. And tada!

Okay, so it doesn’t look terribly impressive this one, but rye bread is supposed to resemble a brick. Honest...

Anyway, it was rather lovely, especially toasted, cut into soldiers and dipped in boiled egg.

Appear to have become somewhat of a bread fiend now. Hurrah for carbs!

Old Project, New Photography - Silver AFI Jewellery

2011-01-30T02:24:00.000-08:00

For many, many years I have been terribly fond of a band called AFI. I made these silver necklaces some time in 2003, inspired by the gorgeous artwork on the cover of their album, Sing the Sorrow (one of my favourite albums of all time). There was a whole collection of symbols and I originally planned to make a necklace for each, but I imagine my short attention span got distracted by some other shiny thing, so only ever got round to making these two.
Silver AFI Jewelry Davey Havok
The inside shapes of the necklaces were pierced from sterling silver sheet, then soldered into a large ring hammered from silver wire. I remember them taking rather a long time to make!

Haven't worn them in forever, but came across them in my jewellery box and thought I'd take some pictures, which came out rather well. Here they are:

I'm still not entirely sure about using this acrylic star as a photography prop. I rather like it as a way to display necklaces, but worry that the lights and shadows detract from the jewellery.

Anyway, must wander back to current shiny project, namely making new collection with which to wow Liberty's buying team...

Liberty Open Call 2011

2011-01-16T00:39:00.000-08:00

So, that exciting but terrifying project I mentioned? I have, in a fit of madness, signed up for Liberty's Best of British open call this year. Liberty has always been one of my favourite places in London, as it's full of beautiful and interesting things and the building itself is incredible. See?

They say:

"Now in its 3rd year the Open Call is continuing to recognise and support new and emerging British design talent and we are again calling for all prospective designers and creative talents to come forward with their ideas. A panel of experts comprising of Liberty’s Managing Director, Ed Burstell, his esteemed buying team and industry experts including top names from press and fashion retail will pick the best designs to be sold in store. Ed Burstell and his team will offer support and direction needed to get your items selling on Liberty’s world renowned shelves."

Having heard from people who have done it in previous years, it sounds a lot like the X-Factor. You register your details, queue for some hours, then you get 3 minutes to pitch your product to Liberty's buying team.

In theory, this doesn't sound too difficult, right? However, those 3 little minutes encompass everthing that I am both terrified by and rubbish at! Self promotion is definitely not my strong point, and I rather belong to the Bridget Jones school of public speaking. This could all go terribly, terribly wrong...

On the other hand, it's good to face your fears, no? I don't think for a second that I will get through the first round, but I think the experience will be very useful. Apparently the buying team give helpful and very constructive feedback, even if they don't think your products are for them. Also, how amazing would it be to launch my new business being able to say that Liberty were a stockist!

It's on 2 April, so I have a couple of months to design some new things and get myself ready. Eek!

Wish me luck...

Experiments with Dough

2011-01-09T03:15:00.000-08:00

So, one of my many random New Year’s resolutions was to blog more. Sadly for you, dear readers, this means that there may be much non-shiny related wittering.

Firstly, I am learning to cook things that aren’t cake. Whilst I remain convinced that a person can cover all necessary food groups with experimental cake recipes, I have yet to convince anyone else.

I’ve always steered clear of making pastry, as it seems fraught with go-wrongable things, but the stuff that comes ready made is always full of strange ingredients. And lard. Bleurgh.

So, I found a recipe for a tart. It had squash in, which is one of my favourite things, especially since acquiring the king of peelers from Lakeland, which happily removes evil squash skin in a second (and means that the boy no longer has to hide behind a cushion in terror as I hack randomly at the poor vegetable with a large knife). Apparently, all ingredients were to be chucked in a food processor and mixed, which sounded super-easy. I always thought pastry took forever and involved rubbing butter and flour together, or some such alchemy, but apparently this is no longer the case.

So, I made pastry, hurrah! And I learned what “blind baking” means (sticking pastry case in oven to pre-cook covered in baking paper and dried beans, for those who want to know).

Behold my tart!

Doesn’t it look lovely? And it came out of the tin and everything! It was even edible and I didn’t poison anyone. I call that a result.

Also, lovely boss gave us the very generous gift of a breadmaker for Christmas. Have wanted one of these for ages, as making bread always looked terribly tricky.

The instructions called for just chucking everything in the machine and ignoring for 4 hours. Whilst this is absolutely my kind of cooking, I didn’t for a second expect it to work. The machine is so very quiet, I didn’t think it could possibly be growing a loaf of bread in there.

But look! We opened the lid to a perfect (and delicious) loaf of bread, hurrah!

Am baking genius.

Well Hello There 2011

2011-01-04T09:42:00.000-08:00

It appears that the time to publish my little review of the year has rolled round again.

So, 2010 then. In some ways, it did rather fly by, but at the same time it seems like forever ago that I moved into my lovely new flat. So, what was last year all about? Hmmm. If 2009 was a year of firsts, I think 2010 was a year of learning. I begin 2011 with rather less bounce and excitement than I did 2010, due to being completely exhausted! I gave pretty much everything I had to my jewellery hobby over the past year, hoping to turn it into a business, with not even a little holiday to chill out a bit.

My, but that was a bit of a moody way to begin this post wasn’t it? I have an annoying habit of getting brought down by all the things I didn’t achieve and kind of forget a bit about the things that I did.

The first exciting thing was that I actually made quite a lot of things for friends this December, hurrah! People were after little crash helmets as Christmas pressies for their derby girlfriends, wives and daughters, including one friend who has to be the coolest dad ever! I ended up getting my little silver derby skate charm finished rather late in the year, but can't wait to sort out a website and start selling, as I invested a lot of time and money into making them.

For next year, the thing I learned from December is that I need to be stricter with cut off deadlines for making this for people for Christmas. There we go, first resolution. Yay!

Another exciting thing was starting to build my website. Which is not yet finished. But I really really meant to finish it by the end of 2010, the making of shiny things just got in the way. I learned that even using an idiot proof web design program is pretty time consuming. Especially with the obsessive way in which I approach things... But yes, it will soon be finished. Honest, it will...

What else did I do? Oh, I made some new business cards for when I'm finally ready to launch, which look like so:

Now I just need to learn to (a) take them places with me, and (b) actually give them to people, rather than just mumbling and running away when people say they like the jewellery I am wearing.

I found a fantastic forum at www.larsandingrid.co.uk, full of lovely people willing to share their jewellery making wisdom and knowledge.

I’ve still managed to find time for some messy and inexpert experiments involving Fimo and wallpaper paste (separately obvs). I am hoping 2011 will also involve some sort of random crafty experimentation.

Some cupcakes were also made, my favourites being my little summer bees:

In other jewellery related stuff, I had some custom boxes made, which finally arrived (very late) near the end of December. Here they are:

Fancy, huh?

I think the boxes were a good investment. Other things I invested in this year were some proper studio lighting (definitely worth it) and a new camera. Although I do kind of wish I’d gone for an SLR...

I also made a couple of sets of custom wedding rings involving skulls, hearts and moustaches, which were great fun to do:

So, all in all I had a very productive, but also very hectic year. 2011 will be more about balance. I will still need to work hard so I can finally launch my business, but shall also take breaks, go on holiday and finally give the long-suffering boy some attention!

Onwards and upwards then. I have a super-exciting (and more than a bit terrifying) project to approach, more of which I shall share later, as I fear I have wittered enough for one day. Farewell for now...

A Belated Merry Christmas

2010-12-31T00:47:00.000-08:00

Well, that was a bit mental! I ended up frantically making things right up until just before Christmas - eek! Added to which, my job was also frantically busy and my body did it's usual end of year shutdown, presenting me with an evil cold just when I didn't have time to get sick. Boooooo.

Had a lovely Christmas with the boy's lovely family in the snowy South West. I was still pretty ill, so everything was a little bit of a daze, but it was nice to have some enforced rest.

Having just started to feel less ill, remembered we had agreed to hold NYE party. Bum. We are, however, dividing the party with our friends who live round the corner, which will be fun. They are hosting drinks and nibbles, then it's over to ours for giant buffet. How terribly grown up.

Spent most of yesterday prepping and cooking, so hopefully it will be okay. First ever attempt at proper pastry making about to go in the oven, so fingers crossed...

Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, have a lovely New Year.

X

A Small Shiny Roller Skate

2010-12-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

I have finally finished my silver roller derby skate charm, hurrah!

This was a project I started way back in 2009, as I wanted to do a skate charm that looked like my Riedell 265 skates.

You may recall that my initial attempts at sculpting the boot in silver clay were somewhat disastrous and looked like this:

Which is rubbish, obviously.

Attempting to sculpt the trucks and axles was even worse, as silver clay is far too brittle to do anything delicate with.

So, I decided to ignore it for a while instead. Obviously, this wasn’t helpful to the overall getting it finished plan.

Finally, defeat was admitted and a modelmaker specialising in sculpting tiny things was called in.

And so over to the very talented (and also terribly patient) James Freckingham of Robotic Industries, who deciphered my scribbly pictures and paragraphs of wittering about wings and delivered me an adorable little replica of my skate. Hurrah! Here it is.

I decided to shorten the wings a little, so it looked like this:

Then off to the caster! Who may have wanted to kill me... Apparently it was terribly difficult to cast, many moulds were made, but finally my little silver castings arrived. Tada!

And, after cleanup, soldering, polishing and attaching wheels, my little silver skate finally looked like so:

Which was exactly what I wanted, yay! A small silver roller derby skate charm, which looked just like my 265s. Except my skates sadly don’t have wings...

A few different angles:

It turned out much heavier than I had thought – the charm weighs around 15 grams, which is a big old chunk of silver!

I also did a couple of special ones with sparkly gemstone attachments to represent league and team colours.

I think they look rather nice...

OMG December!

2010-12-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

Another year, another December sneaking quietly up behind me and shouting "Boo! Here I am!" at the top of its little tinsel-festooned voice.

So, I haven't posted in a while, as I've been ridiculously busy the past month. Trying to get the website finished, ordering business cards, repeatedly chasing up my fancy boxes, which slightly alarmingly still haven't arrived. The UK rep for Dahlinger Boxes with whom I have been dealing initially told me that I would have my boxes within three weeks of ordering - that three week deadline being up today - but seen nowt of them yet, and with my emails going ignored and promises of telephone calls being returned coming to nothing, I have a feeling that they are not going to turn up.

Also, my little silver roller skate charm has caused many headaches for the caster and much expense for me, but the silver castings should be turning up by the end of the year. Exciting! But sadly I will have to charge a lot more than I wanted to for them, due to the insanely expensive casting costs. Booooo. It's also going to take me a while to get them ready to sell, as a lot of work needs to be done on the castings when they come back.

I've also been hard at work on some new shiny weather jewellery to add to my collection and, as I really hate to do a post without any pictures, here they are.

A super-cute little cloud pendant with blue topaz raindrop:

Some rather nice dangly ear wires, as I've made a pair of earrings in this style for each collection I've designed since some time in the year 2000:

And, as the boy pointed out that very few of my collections contain rings (I rarely wear them as they annoy me greatly when I'm cycling), I've actually gone and made some that I really like! A charm ring with an adorable little silver cloud dangling from it and a rather nice band ring with a cloud and a lovely deep blue topaz pear shaped gemstone. Tada!

As I really liked the way they turned out, I think I may make rings more often.

And now I must return to the workshop, where it is currently so cold I can see my breath poof out in little clouds. At least I can tell I'm still alive...

A Halloween Weekend

2010-11-03T14:23:00.001-07:00

I do love Halloween. How could you not? There are ghosts and pumpkins and bats and dressing up and much silliness.

This year, we had a bit of a dinner party on Saturday – it wasn’t an actual Halloween party, but obviously this didn’t stop me from adding pumpkin lights and spooky candles and dancing about in a sparkly spider necklace and glittery bat tights. Apparently one of my dinner guests described me as a cross between Kylie Minogue and Marilyn Manson!

Anyway, here are my pumpkin lights:

I actually want to keep them up all winter. Could I get away with putting them on my Christmas tree I wonder, in a Nightmare Before Christmas inspired fashion? Maybe I’ll sneak them on and the boy won’t notice...

My ludicrous bat candles:

My fabulous sparkly spider necklace:

There would also have been some Halloween inspired cupcakes, but sadly my mixer suffered a rather dramatic death half way through dessert making. I had made some rather distressed looking sugarpaste ghosts that were going to hover on spooky graveyard cupcakes, but sadly it was not to be.

See...

All in all, it was rather fun. We made Spanish food, drank wine and played on the Guitar Hero game that had been delivered that morning. I discovered I am very bad on drums, but much, much worse on vocals!

So that was Saturday and then on Sunday night we went to see ALICE COOPER!!!!!! Amazers! He was doing a 2 night Halloween show at the Roundhouse, which is such a small and lovely venue. It was brilliant fun.

Usually my weekends are spent quietly ensconced at my work bench or watching Come Dine With Me, so it was all a bit hectic and I am sleepy today.

Much work needs to be done this week though. I have two orders for silver crash helmets from the US, plus a further enquiry this morning, so I need to get making things. Exciting!

Oh Dear...

2010-10-23T03:06:00.000-07:00

I have been accidentally buying expensive things again. Having finally just about saved enough money to purchase the shiny new camera I've been coveting for the past year, Canon have only gone and brought out a new model. Drat. Which, of course, I decided that I must have.

I maintain that I cannot be held entirely to blame for this slightly rash and impulsive purchase. The Jessops website tricked me by claiming I could pay for it on 6 month interest free credit. "Hurrah!" I thought, until it asked me if I would like to collect the camera in store, I told it that, yes, that would be lovely thanks, then it concluded my order and smugly informed me that the balance would be payable in full on collection of the camera. Bum! I guess the interest free credit option and the collect in store option were not compatible.

Consequently, I now own a rather expensive but quite lovely Canon SX30.

Fancy Box Design

2010-10-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

I think I may have finally made a decision on my endless packaging dilemma. I have been reading about how, as a jeweller, how you present yourself and your brand is super-important, which is something I've been giving more thought to as I've been messing about with my website. I've been looking at some quite nice pink and black boxes, but when it came down to investing in logo printing on them, I just couldn't quite commit, as I wasn't 100% happy with them.

After much dithering, I decided I was going to get some custom made leather boxes, but after pricing it all up, it was just way too expensive and I couldn't quite justify the cost.

Some more dithering has finally brought me to the idea of having the design I use for the background of my banner and website foil printed in high gloss black onto a matte black box, with a little gold keyhole printed on the front of the box.

I have faffed about with photoshop and come up with this not terribly professional mockup of how I want them to look:

And yes, I am aware that graphic design is not one of my strengths, thank you...

But hopefully this will give the nice box people a visual idea of what I'm after, as I'm rubbish at explaining stuff without pictures. Hopefully they can do it...

UK Jewellers Collective

2010-10-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

I have recently joined this rather amazing forum, which can be found here. It is full of very, very helpful and lovely people and much advice on all things jewellery making related.

One of the members of the forum recently organised a charm swap, which I signed up for. It was much fun, and involved receiving the name and address of another forum member, for whom you would make and send a charm. The recipient of your charm would not know who made it, and in return you would receive an anonymous charm from a different member. I decided to do a little birthstone flower and asked the organiser for my person's birth month.

And here it is - Emerald birthstone charm for May:

And with some playing around in Lightroom to make the stones change colour:

The charm I received was rather fab, with an amazing leaf texture on the outside and gorgeous vintage style photograph inside. Very me :)

Here it is:

Watching all the photographs of the charms appear as people received them, and trying to guess who had made each one kept me glued to the forum for days, and at the end all the pictures were put in a gallery and it was eventually worked out who made what.

Fab idea, no?

New Commission

2010-10-03T06:22:00.000-07:00

Hiya,

So, it appears I have been awol from my blog for the past couple of weeks, partly due to exciting shiny thing making, but also partly due to a much less exciting stressful time at work trying to clear my desk before my week off next week. Yep, I get a WHOLE WEEK OFF! Actually, it will be the first time this year that I get a week off, as I've mainly just booked the odd couple of days here and there up until now. I think I'm due some downtime - the boy stated that I am currently lacking in both patience and a sense of humour, both of which he deems necessary in order to put up with him! Bless.

Right, less of the boring work stress, more of the exciting shiny things!

I've been asked by some friends to make another pair of creative wedding rings, a sneak preview of which I gave you in my last post. We based the design on a tattoo one of the couple has - here are my original sketches (stop giggling at the back there, I am fully aware that drawing is not really my thing)

And this is how they turned out:

The back of the winged heart ring has a tiny skull, and the back of the winged skull ring has a tiny heart. So the rings aren't identical, but complimentary, see?

This was yet another design, where I went "Oh, that won't be too difficult..." Pause "...oh, wait". But, it actually turned out to be really fun to make, rather than the nightmare I had predicted, due to my amazing new saw, but I'll save that for a whole tool geekery post all of its own.

In other shiny things news, an exciting new roller derby project will be coming your way shortly, plus some more shiny weather. Watch this space...

Can You Tell What It Is Yet?

2010-09-11T07:30:00.001-07:00

A sneaky preview of my latest project...

I Have Been a Bit Naughty...

2010-09-10T05:22:00.000-07:00

I have always struggled somewhat with jewellery photography. Whilst I do have a lightbox, kindly built for me by my former flatmate, it’s not ideal. Nor are my motley collection of spotlights, with their random wattage bulbs, some daylight(ish), some not.

Added to this is the fact that I’ve not a clue what an f-stop is or what it might do, so I usually end up taking around 200 shots to get a couple that are usable after much faffing around with Lightroom.

So, I have been a little bit naughty and invested in one of these lovely jewellery photography setups from Tabletop Studio:

T’was rather expensive, which means that I can’t get my roots done for the next couple of months, but I think I can probably put up with the trashy blonde look in the name of better photographs :)

And better they are! The lights are so very, very bright and the light tent diffuses them perfectly, so there’s no evil shadows.

If you compare this shot, which was the best of about 100 shots taken with my old setup, and looks like this after many hours in Lightroom...

... to this one, taken with my lovely new Tabletop Studio, and having only spent about 5 minutes on it removing some dust specks in Lightroom, the difference is definitely visible, no? The light is just more even, with no pesky shadows or reflections, and the colour of the stones really pops out.

So yes, it was definitely worth the money, and the having to deal with horrible hair for the foreseeable future.

Silver Cloud Jewellery

2010-09-09T04:17:00.000-07:00

I have now finished turning the small pile of weather from my earlier post into actual shiny things, hurrah!

We have some tiny cloud earrings:

Tiny clouds with some rather nice sparkly blue topaz raindrops:

The boy says they are too dangly, but I likes my earrings very dangly. Perhaps I shall shorten them to a slightly more manageable length when I sell them though. They are admittedly quite long, but are definitely my new favourite earrings.

We also have a rather lovely two cloud necklace with more dangly raindrops. It's quite chunky, so has a nice weight to it and is lovely to just play with whilst wearing it.

And my favouritest bit of shiny weather, which I have worn every day since I finished it, is the cloud and sunshine. I'm calling it my rain or shine necklace. Tis reversible, see? So, if you're in a good mood, you can wear it with the sunshine obscuring the cloud:

But if you're feeling like a bit of a grouch, you can wear it the other way, so the cloud obsures the sun:And here's another couple of shots of them, as I was playing with my exciting new studio lights, more of which later...

All in all, I was super happy with the way my shiny weather turned out :) I have a proper little collection and everything. I have designed a ring to go with it, but I need to make some silver settings first, as I would want the raindrops to be slightly different. Making settings is very, very dull, so the ring may not make it's little shiny appearance for a while yet though.

Tomato? Or Triffid?

2010-08-20T10:06:00.000-07:00

I am a bit rubbish with plants. Tis a fact. Since moving into the flat at the end of January, I've killed three mint plants. Three! Yes, dear readers, I am a mint murderer.

Also, I have watched the depressing demise of two rosemary plants and two basils. To be fair, the second basil was doing really really well, like a smally basily bush, until it was infested by some small and horrid beasties. I really can't be blamed for beasties, can I?

Anyway, it was with some trepidation that I purchased a baby tomato plant, but six inches high. I lovingly repotted it, sat back and waited for it to die. But no! A miracle! It grew! And then grew some more. And kept growing and growing. My mother instructed me to stop it growing by pinching off the top when it got to a certain height, but giddy with excitement that I had finally made a plant happy and could now one day progress to a kitten, I couldn't quite bring myself to squash its ambition.

And now it looks like this...

I have now tried to pinch off the top so it doesn't grow any more, but it is waving rude gestures in my direction and sprouting new bits all over the place.

If you don't hear from me again, the tomato plant has probably eaten us and it shall be known that mum was right...

Flight of the (Marzipan) Bumblebee

2010-07-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I haven't quite been chained to my workbench finishing off my shiny weather, as the small matter of the London Rollergirls season championship bout rather got in the way. I miss roller derby terribly, and it was really lovely to see everyone. Such a close and exciting game!

Obviously, being a former rollergirl, it would have been very bad form to show up without cupcakes, so I made some in league colours with my exciting new patterned icing embossy thing.

I have to say, I wasn't expecting it work at all, but I think they look rather good actually.

And look at these:

I found a super-fun icing attachment that makes the icing look like grass! Brilliant! Then I made some bumble bees to go on top of the cupcakes out of marzipan and flower paste. How cute are they?

Sadly, I had some of the little guys left over, bereft of a small cake to perch atop. I couldn't quite bring myself to eat them, due to their smiley little faces, but the boy had no such qualms and I believe has now munched through the lot. Poor little bees.

So, after my small diversion into confectionary , I'm back off to the workshop now.

A Small Pile of Weather

2010-07-18T05:29:00.000-07:00

Shiny weather! Well, alright, it's not at all shiny just yet, this is what it comes back from the caster looking like:

Soon, it shall be turned into shiny silver cloud necklaces and earrings and sunshine necklaces too.

I get all excited when I collect castings - the two lovely guys who do my casting think I'm a teeny little bit mental. But I was especially excited to see how the sunshine turned out, as it was an absolute bugger to sprue and mould.

I shall now be chained to my workbench until they're finished.

I Has a Cuckoo Clock...

2010-07-07T13:14:00.000-07:00

I love cuckoo clocks. I have been coveting one for quite some time and when I saw this lovely walnut timepiece of awesomeness by Diamantini & Domeniconi I knew it must be mine. It's possibly the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen and therefore perfect!

See? It has antlers and everything! And a swingy pendulum thing at the bottom. And it does match the furniture...

Sadly, I had to admire from afar for a while, as it was very, very expensive, but I finally tracked it down for cheap(er) in a furniture store in Islington. And now it is mine :)

Now the boy usually does a fairly good job of moderating my more bonkers ideas, but in this case all I can say is HA! FAIL!!! He actually quite likes the clock, and has complained that over time I have somewhat skewed his idea of ridiculousness. This can only be a good thing, no...?

I have also sneakily purchased some skull fabric, with which I shall be making a pouffe. Watch out for another of my inexpert experiments in making stuff soon.

New Shiny Project - Gothic/Baroque Initial Pendants

2010-07-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

This is one of the new, entirely non-roller derby related projects I have been working on over the past couple of months.

I had been wanting an initial charm for my bracelet, which now makes a lovely jingly noise when I type, but could only find very boring fonts, machine stamped out of really thin sheet (which looks a bit rubbish to be honest, and the edges are all sharp and unfinished). Aha! I thought, I shall make something more chunky. Picked three of my favourite fonts and set about doing A, B, and C out of each. I cut them out of just under 2mm thick sheet, which makes them nice and solid. I think they turned out really well - just need to build a page for them on the website now...

First, a lovely tattoo style Baroque font:

Then, a kind of cute, curvy goth font

And finally, a kind of Tim Burton/Nightmare Before Christmas inspired gothic font. Although the C also looks kind of Olde English style.

I'm also working on something else which I'm very excited about and which makes me smile every time I think about it. More soon...

EDIT 15/5/11: You can now see all of the different letters and purchase initial necklaces here on my website. I also take commissions for Gothic/Olde English style name necklaces, just send me an email to hello@laurengrace.co.uk to have a chat about what you would like.

Spiky Shiny Things

2010-06-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

I was having a rummage through my jewellery box before doing a photshoot last weekend and came across some rings I made at college. It appears that my obsession with making things very pointy started a while ago...

I seem to recall having vague notions of making a whole set of claw rings, one for each finger, but never quite got around to it.

Another little obsession I had at college for a while was drilling holes in things:

And a couple of little composite shots of the set:

I still need an image for the front page of my website, but I don't think any of these are it. Maybe my new and exciting project will give me something amazing...

New Roller Derby Charm

2010-06-28T13:23:00.000-07:00

It may appear from my last couple of posts that I've not been terribly constructive on the shiny things front. Not so! I've been working really hard, honest I have, I've just been a bit rubbish recently about blogging work in progress.

I've had a few friends ask recently if I'd make them plain roller derby helmet charm, so it can be engraved with skate names and/or numbers, and I've finally made one and had it cast.

I am hoping to take a class on acid etching soon, so that I can sort out the names and numbers myself. Scary chemicals - eek!

Whilst I had the camera out, I figured I'd also do some better pictures of my little pivot helmet, as I was never entirely happy with those.

Also, I had a play with doing a little helmet composition shot - thought it might work on a business card perhaps...?

I also have some super-exciting non-roller derby related jewellery in progress right now - pictures soon...

How to Wallpaper an Artist's Canvas

2010-06-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

From the title of this post, you would be forgiven for thinking that I may actually be about to impart some wisdom on the matter, but fear not dear readers, this project has been approached with my usual mix of haphazardness and blind faith. Mess and chaos did, somewhat inevitably, ensue.

Now, our flat has very large, extremely dull, white walls. So, I figured, why not add some colour by using wallpaper - it will be easier than actually creating a painting, right? Especially as I've not picked up a paintbrush for a good few years now. The fact that I have never wallpapered anything in my life is neither here nor there...

So, canvasses and wallpaper acquired, I telephoned my mother for advice. She knows how to wallpaper things, see. We would have to paint the canvases with a thin layer of wallpaper paste, she said, and leave to dry before then pasting the wallpaper. It's called sizing, apparently. So, we covered the floor with a massive tarpaulin (I knew there would be mess. There's always mess) and got to work.

I used Solvite wallpaper adhesive that you have to mix up yourself, divided it into 4 and worked out how much water I needed for the sizing. We mixed the correct quantities (I think - maths not really my area of expertise), but if I were to do this again, I would paint the canvases with a much thicker coat of paste, in order to get the actual canvas part much stiffer than we did.

Unhelpfully, I couldn't find any instructions on the adhesive pack or on the interwebs for how long the wallpaper paste would take to dry. We ended up leaving it overnight, although having left the sized canvasses in a warm room, they were dry in a couple of hours.

So, onto the wallpapering! How hard can this possibly be, I thought. Somewhat obviously, as with most of my experimental projects that seem super-easy in my head, it turned out to actually be quite difficult. Sensibly, I purchased a cheap roll of wallpaper to practice on, as canvasses are sold in pairs, so we had a spare. Less sensibly, I chose as my practice roll a very heavily embossed Anaglypta. Then failed to read the instructions on the roll of paper. This is unlike me, I'm normally very much Instructions Girl, which is good, as the boy is more of a charge in headfirst, scattering instructions in his wake kinda person. Today, he has been enlisted as my glamourous assistant:

Anyway, we mixed up the adhesive again and pasted the paper. Then plonked it straight onto the canvas, without leaving it to soak into the paper. This was the not following instructions part. Still, it all seemed to go okay until we discovered that the edges were conspiring against us and refusing to stick to the canvas. Attempting to line up the second piece was also tricky. So, basically, our join looked rubbish. See?

Second one worked slightly better. More paste under the join seemed to help. Here is my glamorous assistant showing the difference between our first and second joins. Improvement was definitely made.

So, done with the practice one and feeling like we learned some stuff, we moved on to a rather lovely Graham & Brown paper - kind of a dark turquoise with a cool toned metallic gold vintage pattern. This one, I actually read the instructions on the paper, pasted and and left to soak for 5 minutes. Oh, also discovered that it helps to line up the patterns and cut out all the pieces before pasting anything. Just a little tip for you there...

We still had some joining problems. I think the problem is that a wall is nice and solid and you can really press down on the joins, whereas a canvas is a bit more flexible. I was a also a bit worried out getting paste on my lovely shiny paper, so could definitely have used more on the joins. But, it actually looked okay.

The final (and rather more complicated) canvas was a massive 6' x 4' one, to be hung landscape style and papered with Osborne and Little Grove Garden wallpaper, which I have been obsessing over for some years. Small and brighly coloured hummingbirds! Annoyingly, the canvas was slightly too wide for three drops of paper, so we also had to cut a silly little strip for one end. Bah.

Given what we'd learned so far, we were way more liberal with the wallpaper paste for this one, which made the joins stick much better.

Work in progress:

Having stuck down all of the pieces, I then spent the next hour stalking bubbles across the canvas. I may have tendencies to obsessiveness...

So, the next thing on my "what not to do" tips is drench a large frame of wood and canvas with liquid glue, leave it lying in a hot and sunny room and then toddle off down the pub. There were some teensy warping issues on the frame:

Once the canvases were dry, we folded over all the paper edges, having previously decided that trying to paste them to the edges of the canvas would be horrible, and staple gunned them to the back of the frame. Like so:

The boy found the staple gunning part terribly exciting and went off in search of more things to staple. Had the pictures not already looked a bit on the wonky side, I would have probably cut little v shapes out of the corners and folded them in a mitre joint kind of way. But they were, so I didn't.

Hung them on the walls and, apart from the horrible warping on the large frame, they actully don't look too awful. They could have been better, but given the slightly cavalier way we approached the project, they could have been much, much worse.

So, if you're thinking of doing something similar, I hope this little post is of some assistance, as despite extensive Googling, I couldn't find any information on wallpapering an artist's canvas, hence the write up.

Experiments with Goo

2010-05-29T11:49:00.000-07:00

I have been having vague ideas about making cupcake charms recently. But how, I thought, would one make the little swirly mountain of icing that traditionally sits atop one? Tricky...

But wait! Why not use actual icing equipment? Brilliant, no? Er, not so much actually. My theory was sound - mix enough clay softener with the Sculpey to make a suitable texture for squishing out of a piping tip and off we go. What I hadn't quite bargained for was just how very, very sticky the resulting goo would become. I managed to cover pretty much everything in bright pink gunge. Whilst I found this quite entertaining, the boy found it less so, as he was working on a Very Important Document for work. Apparently my sitting at the table giggling like a small child and chatting away to myself about pink squelchy stuff was distracting or something. It was pointed out to me that I appear to have no internal monologue...

Anyway, here is a picture of some pink goo whilst it was still relatively contained in one space:

The swirling actually worked okay, but the consistency of goo was a bit too stringy, hence all the wobbling great ends everywhere.

After the swirling, they went in the oven. Which smelled very, very bad. I feel I should take this opportunity to apologise to my mother for all the small and misshapen Fimo creatures I baked in her oven as a child, thus filling her kitchen with the vile stink of burning chemicals. Sorry, Mum!

I think I may have failed at oven temperature setting. Or left them in too long. Whatever. They ended up somewhat burned and very much welded to the base of my tart tin:

Managed to find a couple of usable ones and prised them off the base though. Look, tiny swirls!

So, in theory, I could now make a silicon mold of the best one, fill it with silver clay and fire it to create a pure silver swirl. I think perhaps before I do that, I might have a go at carving a swirl out of wax instead though...

In other news, website 2.0 is looking much better than the first attempt. It's still very much work in progress, but it's mine and I made it all by myself, so ner!

Web Design - 1, Lauren - 0

2010-05-05T00:39:00.001-07:00

So, I figured it was about time I got me a website. Having checked out some web design companies, it seemed that a basic site would set me back in the region of £400. Eek! This is way more money than is sitting in my jewellery account right now. Also, am total control freak so handing it over to someone else was always going to be a bit tricky.

How hard can it possibly be to build a website then? Turns out, quite difficult, specially if you are a techno-retard like me. I signed up for Moonfruit, which is apparently idiot proof, and started adding pictures. This is easy, I thought. Yay! Then I did something alarming to the background of the site, which resulted in the whole thing turning black, throwing a huge hissy fit and refusing to let me even go near the editing tools again. I proceeded to email the support people, who scratched their heads and told me they'd not encountered this before and weren't really sure what I'd done to it. Idiot proof my arse. Or possibly I am a very special kind of idiot.

But, I will not be beaten! I'm starting again with a new site, hoping to even the score to at least a 1-1 draw. This time perhaps I won't touch the background though...

Wedding Rings! With Moustaches!

2010-04-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

I recently received a request from a friend to make some custom silver moustache wedding rings. I think this has to be the bestest idea for wedding rings I have ever heard :)

Anyway, the original design brief was a silver band, with a heart cut of out one side and a twirly villain moustache cut out the other side. Awesome, thinks I. All I have to do is purchase unfinished wedding bands in the correct size, do the cutouts with tiny sawblades, polish, and done. Simples. No soldering, nothing. Take me a day, tops.

Of course, the designs you think will be the simplest often turn out to be completely horrible to make. Mainly because I am an idiot. For some reason, it didn't even occur to me that trying to saw out a shape from an already constructed ring would be nigh on impossible, due to the fact that the OTHER SIDE OF THE RING is in the way of the sawblade. Duh... The fact that I also chose lovely chunky thick bands did nothing to help the situation.

Anyway, I battled on with the heart cut outs, holding the saw at a ridiculous angle to avoid cutting into the other side. There were some dark mutterings, some occasional swearing and several broken sawblades. After much filing and all the fingers on my right hand going numb, I had the hearts finished. Now they looked okay, but a heart is a pretty fluid and organic kinda shape. A curly moustache, not so much. It was becoming apparent that there was no way I would be able to cut the moustache out of the other side and, with but days to go until the wedding, I had to make an executive decision to alter the original design and cut out the moustaches separately and solder them to the ring instead of cutting them out, which I felt pretty bad about, as I was no longer sticking to the original design given to me. I knew if I persisted with the cut outs, the rings just wouldn't look good though, and I would have felt terrible handing something over that I knew wasn't good enough.

Anyway, amidst the trauma, I managed to take a couple of pictures of work in progress. I also wound up deciding to make little frames for the heart cutouts, so the whole design matched and it wasn't like one side was cut out and one side was soldered on.

And just look at the tiny moustaches - I'm totally going to make more of these and turn them into earrings and bracelets and necklaces and anything else I can think of to put moustaches on!

And the finished rings:

Really happy with how they turned out, despite having to change the original design.

And some more pictures. The rings photographed pretty well, so I couldn't decide which shots to use. So I'm posting them all...

The Art of Doodling

2010-04-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time on the telephone when I’m at work. Looking back through my message pad before my boss went on holiday to make sure I’d done everything, it appears that I am incapable of holding a telephone conversation without drawing over everything. I am Doodle Queen!

Apparently, this does not actually mean that I’m not paying the slightest bit of attention to the person on the other end, as according to the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, doodling can actually help with remembering the details of a conversation. It appears that if you are focused on your little picture, it actually prevents your mind from wandering during a long conversation rather than the doodling distracting you.

For me, sometimes my doodles are just random scribbles, but more often they relate to the person I’m speaking to. When I’m on the phone to the boy, I tend to doodle flowers (this may sound unbearably cute, but most of the time the flower has turned into more of a triffid by the end of the conversation!)

I think, even though you’re not really aware of what you’re doodling – perhaps just starting off with a random shape, the doodle can definitely reveal your state of mind at the time. We had a particular client whose name was always surrounded by grumpy thunderclouds, raindrops and lightening by the time he’d finally got off the phone. There’s definitely more doodling going on when I’m talking to people who are annoying or frustrating me. My speciality appears to be unhappy little creatures! Here’s a couple of my favourites...

Mad Hatters Tea Party

2010-04-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

I love afternoon tea. Those tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off (cucumber, of course), the pretty cakes, the posh tea drunk out of proper teacups. Just the old fashioned englishness of it all, really.

So, off we pottered to the Sanderson Hotel the other weekend for afternoon tea with a slight twist. The Sanderson are currently running a mad hatters tea party, which was supposed to be just for March to tie in with Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland movie, but they’ve extended it now until May I think, as it’s been so popular.

The Sanderson looks fairly unassuming from the outside, but the huge bar inside and the covered courtyard garden where the afternoon tea is served are so very pretty, with lots of natural light and plants and even a fountain.

Whilst it was not as good as afternoon tea at the Ritz, it was half the price! Also, the little sandwiches all had brightly coloured bread – you don’t get that at the Ritz :)

Scones were just so-so, but the cakes were fab! Chocolate and raspberry cupcake had popping candy in it and the queen of hearts cake was a kind of strawberry mousse encased in a strawberry and white chocolate shell. Then, to finish, lollipops that turn from hot to cold.

I may have left on somewhat of a sugar high!

Next stop – Claridges...

Custom Silver Sock Charm

2010-03-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

So, I was contacted by a very nice lady, who had seen my stripy derby sock charm on my blog, but wanted a pair of them and for the socks to be a little shorter as a present for her friend. My first ever custom order from a complete stranger!

And voila: This was my original...

And this was my custom...

Apologies for the dreadful photography - I had to take it on my camera phone with no stablisation.

It's the first thing I've actually soldered and made in my new workshop and the new space is a million times more comfortable than the old one!

Now if I could just finish my little skate charm...

The Make Lounge

2010-03-19T01:03:00.000-07:00

As my sewing machine has been sat grumpily in the corner recently, throwing me occasional reproachful looks, and my friend Jennie hasn't even taken hers out of its box yet, we signed up for a cushion making workshop at the Make Lounge. I've been cycling past the Make Lounge every weekday morning for several months now, and have been meaning to go in, as their shop window is filled with lovely colourful things.

So, armed with nowt but our bicycles (everything you need to make the cushion is included in the cost of the workshop, hurrah!) we pottered off to Islington.

The hardest part was choosing what fabric to make the cushion from, as you can choose from the hundreds of lovely and quirky patterned fabrics in their shop. I went with a turquoise and green butterfly print.

The tutor was really good, very patient and helpful, as the course is aimed at complete beginners, who have never used a sewing machine before. Even though I have, I still learned loads and found it really informative.

And here is my cushion:

Cute huh? It definitely brightens up my boring old sofa.

And, with my newly acquired cushion making skills, together with an alrmingly large bag of stuffing that I ordered (it's sold by weight, I had no idea what the actual volume of the stuff would be!), I have also created this cushion:

It was actually supposed to be more of a pouffe type thingy, but dimensions and 3D visualisation are not my strong points. Still, looks nice, no?

Right, let's get on with it then...

2010-03-05T06:10:00.000-08:00

I appear to have been somewhat lacking in motivation for shiny things since I moved house. Partly because I have been asleep rather a lot, and partly because I'm just enjoying hanging out with the boy. Also, my workshop is quite cold.

Anyway, no more of this nonsense! Let's have some motivation please...

I have booked into the London Jewellery School (happily now moved from Dulwich (miles away) to Hatton Garden (right near where I work and on the way home), this evening to re-fire my little silver derby skate, now that I've added laces to it. Also, I've painted over the Union Jack logo on the master copy of my crash helmet charm with silver clay, to (hopefully) make a plain crash helmet, which I will then attempt to master the art of etching on, so I can make tiny crash helmets with skate names/numbers on. Because they will be proper cute :)

My New Workspace

2010-02-22T02:48:00.002-08:00

After going rather off-tangent with the blog posting recently, due to not having the facilities to make stuff, let’s get back to the point, shall we?

After some frustrating experiences and terrible customer service involving trying to purchase a small piece of vinyl flooring from B&Q, I finally admitted defeat. Shortly after which, the nice finance people on BBC news in the morning said that B&Q’s profits were down this year. Perhaps if they made it slightly less difficult for you to actually buy something, they might make a bit more money, no?

Anyway, I pottered off to Carpet Right in Stamford Hill instead, where they happily cut me a piece of flooring there and then and I ambled off home with it clutched under my arm.

Finally having acquired this all important bit of floor to place under my workbenches (so as not to damage the landlord’s floor, I could finally unpack all my tools, yay!

And this is my new workspace:

It’s almost like the space was made for me. The workbench, shelves of chemicals and tool cabinet fit along the wall under the mezzanine perfectly, and there is already a handy spotlight positioned above. Now that the tool cabinet no longer has to live under the jeweller’s bench, I can actually sit at the thing properly, without spending hours with my knees twisted to the side. I think my spine will be happy about this...

I also got a magnetic strip thingy from Ikea, which I have now screwed to the bench so I can stick all my pliers/tweezers/files to it, rather than them ending up all over the place. Sticking everything to it was a surprising amount of fun :)

So, now I have no more excuses, expect something shiny coming this way soon...

X

Tropical Cupcakes...

2010-02-22T02:48:00.001-08:00

Hi again,

Still no shiny things, I’m afraid, but I thought I’d share with you some rather fun cupcakes I made for the last London Rollergirls bout. I am unleashing my frustrated creativity via the medium of cake :)

The event was called Club Tropicarnage (my favourite name for a bout so far) so I went all tropical and made some pina colada flavour cupcakes, with rum and pineapple and a coconut frosting, and some margarita flavour ones, with lime, margarita mix and tequila. Then I added frosting and decorations till they looked bonkers enough...

Here you go:

I also made some slightly more sensible victoria sponge cupcakes for a visit from the boy’s sister. They were really yummy :)

I think I would like to be one of those people whose house always contains cake when people come to visit...

...And I'm Back!

2010-02-10T05:17:00.000-08:00

Hiya *waves* It's me again!

Yes, it's been a while. I've had no internet for a couple of weeks, so no blogging for me :(

But... guess what?

The boy and I are all moved into our new flat now, woohooooo! We discovered that between us we owned three coffee tables but only one fork. Eating salad with a spoon can be quite challenging...

The actual move itself was pretty stress-free, thanks to the muscle power and organisational skills of the boy's awesome friends and the tetris-packing skills of John the van man, who managed to fit my not insignificant amount of junk all into the van in one load.

We've just about unpacked, finally, although we need a bookcase, so some boxes will have to remain for a while till we can afford something nice.

So all in all, everything is good. I have never properly lived with a boy before, and I rather like it, although I have discovered that living with someone means I can no longer come home from work and eat cheese sandwiches for dinner though. Apparently that's not proper food or some such nonsense... Consequently, I am putting on some much-needed weight, hurrah! Derby thighs shall be mine once more :)

No shiny things yet, sadly, as I need to purchase a strip of lino to put under my workbench and cabinets to make absolutely sure I don't damage the floor that does not belong to me. It's weird, living in a house that belongs to someone else...

In the world of my old house, the bathroom did finally get finished.

Almost done here....

And tada!!! This is it pretty much finished, apart from the bright pink waterproof roller blind (thanks for the idea mum) that will cover the window and match the bath mat nicely.

And a little closeup of my nice sink, which turned out to be somewhat bigger than it looked in the picture. Turns out you're supposed to check the measurements, not just look at a picture and say "oh, that looks about right". Pah! What do they know? It looked fine in the end :)

So, onwards and upwards now. First task is to sort out workshop floor, then finish rollerskate. There will also be more new-flat related stuff I suspect. Do yell if you get bored...

Bye for now X

More Progress!

2010-01-22T00:52:00.000-08:00

I has a floor. Squeal!!!!

Tada!

Am also adopting alarmingly cavalier attitude to packing up my entire life. Especially given how long it usually takes me to pack for a week's holiday...

I have but three packing boxes left and a lot more than three packing boxes worth of stuff to fit in them. Not entirely sure how that's going to work out...

A Work in Progress...

2010-01-21T01:22:00.000-08:00

There is now a bath in my bathroom! Wheeeeeeeee!

And some tiles. Look!

Tis still looking far from finished, but I really love the wall tiles - so glad I chose these instead of boring old square ones.

And some floor tiles are down too!

I've always wanted a bathroom with a chequerboard floor :)

My house is still filled with devastation. And Ukrainians. But at least the end is, whilst not quite in sight, a vague shimmer on the horizon. Yay!

Bathroom Trauma

2010-01-20T06:54:00.000-08:00

My house is currently filled with devastation and Ukrainians.

We are having the bathroom entirely stripped out and remodelled before the new tenant arrives to replace me, as I am moving out on Sunday. Yep, that's right, ON SUNDAY!!!!!

The builders arrived on Thursday and removed my entire bathroom, leaving a rather damp and horrible empty shell. New things have gradually been delivered, resulting in the living room now containing two sofas, a bath, shower screen, taps, a sink and, the piece de resistance, a toilet sitting at the end of the sofa! My workshop is filled with old stuff that used to be in the bathroom and all the corridors are piled high with toolboxes, alarming looking power tools and containers of random gloop.

Whilst I'm sure my design will look fab when it's finished, the whole thing is a bit traumatic at the moment. Boohoo.

A Belated Hello to 2010

2010-01-13T14:02:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know it’s now January 13th, and traditionally I think one should publish a retrospective of the year past and resolutions for the year to come slightly earlier in the month, but just for a change it’s all been a bit manic.

I started this blog close to a year ago with the renovation of my room of junk into a proper workshop. It seems like forever ago now! The purpose of the blog was to write about my experiences in setting up a creative business, both good and bad, and to motivate me to continue.

Looking back on that blog post from January 2009 makes me smile. It was all full of bouncy optimism, and I had no idea what I would be able to achieve – I didn’t make a plan, or set any particular goals. I was just happy to pick up a pencil.

In the end, though, I think I achieved more than I could have imagined. The year 2009 was a year of firsts. Looking back through the blog, I’ve learned to make small hats, become obsessed with fabric, learned how to use silver clay, resculpted and repainted a mannequin head, invested my performance bonus from work in a whole load of new tools, set myself impossible deadlines (and met them), made tiny silver crash helmets and stripy socks, and designed my first ever business cards. I’ve been to Torture Garden for the first time, I’ve made my first ever thing for a complete stranger, who just happened to have come across my work on my blog. I’ve made wedding rings for friends, I’ve worked with gold and diamonds on some earrings for my mum, I’ve learned a whole lot about photography and discovered the amazingness of Lightroom as an editing program. Oh, and I also made a hell of a lot of cupcakes...

All in all, 2009 was pretty awesome :) I focused, I worked really hard, and I think I accomplished rather a lot, especially seeing as I have a full time job and all. But also, I had a lot of fun in 2009. I got to skate a few times, despite having given up being on a team, I had one of the best birthdays ever and I even had time for a holiday in the sunshine.

So, moving forward now, I guess I should make some plans, or at the very least some New Year’s resolutions...

The main thing that will be different this year, is that I am moving in with my lovely and long suffering boyfriend in exactly 10 days! This makes me very happy, as it will finally feel like we’re a proper couple, rather than both of us trying to find time in a hectic schedule for the other. Our new flat is rather splendid and has a spare room for me to turn into a workshop again. Having become so used to my own space, my first resolution will definitely have to be less of a control freak :) I must learn that everything will not be done my way, that there must be compromise. That everything doesn’t need to match perfectly and that clashing styles and ideas can work together just as well. Neither of us has really properly lived with a partner before, so we will muddle through together. And it will be ace :)

So, as with January 2009’s entry, I shall be bouncy, positive, and excited about the year to come, but will make no targets and set no specific goals for now. Well, it worked pretty well last year...

Damask Dragons

2009-12-30T10:33:00.000-08:00

Now this was my final jewellery project of the year. And actually probably the most difficult one. Maybe not the most technically challenging, as that honour belongs to my tiny crash helmets, but certainly the project I had the most trouble getting my head around.

As you may have noticed, I rather like baroque style and vintage wallpaper, and have been basing a lot of designs around this. Having promised a friend that I would make some earrings as a Christmas present for his girlfriend in return for hooking me up with a pro photographer, I duly emailed him my designs. He came back with "Oooh, like that but a bit more dragony please". "Hmmm, interesting..." I thought. "Dragons..."

Now, I kind of suck at making things look like other things, hence my trepidation and slight procrastination of this project. I needed to find a way to keep the feel of the original design, and also make it look a bit dragony without looking, well, crap really.

So, armed with my sketchbook and pencils, I set off for a distraction-free weekend chilling out with my mum. After many hours of drawing and squinting at swirly shapes, I managed to come up with something I thought looked kind of cool, and happily the friend agreed, so I set to work. And this was the result:

I think they actually turned out pretty awesome. This is my favourite kind of metalwork to do, starting with a blank piece of sheet silver and slowly piercing out and carving the edges of the design. I can happily sit at my workbench for hours merrily sawing away. Some days you can go through corners and points for ever without breaking a single sawblade, other days you can break five of them in two minutes, just sawing a straight line.

Again, I've been indecisive about the photography style and have also done one on an earring bust just to show the scale.

So, I guess the lesson learned was that sometimes it's good to be dragged begrudgingly from your comfort zone, as what you end up creating could well be one of your favourite pieces...

New Shiny Things

2009-12-26T08:59:00.000-08:00

Hello! And a merry Christmas to everyone :)

Now that presents have all been opened, I can share with you my newest shiny things, made for the boy's mother and sister as Christmas pressies.

First, some rather nice damask wallpaper inspired earrings, set with opals and finished off with some fab blue topaz teardrops that I've been wanting to use for a while...

I'm still rather indecisive about which photography style I prefer, so I'm just taking photos of everything in different ways till I make my mind up. Maybe I'll wind up using both anyway, so I can have a bit of variety on the eventual website...

And a little detail shot here for a better view of the opals, as the colours were so bright and lovely. I actually rescued the little opals from a quite hideous shiny thing I made a long time ago. They were just too pretty to be trapped in something so alarmingly ugly. I felt they deserved a better life...

Also, a lovely birthstone charm for the boy's sister, as he bought her a silver charm bracelet as a present when we were on holiday in LA last summer and wanted something she could add to it.

I figured I'd do a shot of it on a chain, as I already have shots of another birthstone charm I made on a bracelet.

So, what with the little shiny things above, the engagement charms and another pair of Christmas pressie commissioned earrings (more of which later) I had a bit of a mental December actually. My fingers went numb many times, my random right-hand eczema went bonkers and I had a few pretty late nights where my neighbours probably did not thank me for the hammering. I shall look upon it as revenge for their child's obsession with tunelessly wailing High School Musical songs for hours on end whilst I was working.

Anyway, December generally ended up with me having mainly forgotten about Christmas until, well, Christmas Eve really. You know those people that lead you to wonder "Who on earth does their food shopping for Christmas on Christmas Eve...?" That would be me. Ooops. But, mainly by fluke, it all turned out okay, and we had a lovely chilled out day of champagne, food, TV and snoozing on the sofa. And, to be honest, there's not much more you can ask for on Christmas day than that :)

Engagement Charm

2009-12-23T06:56:00.000-08:00

As I have a lovely boss, who always gets me really cool presents, I wanted to make her something nice as a Christmas present.

She mentioned a while ago that she has a gold charm bracelet and, helpfully, she has very recently got engaged, so "aha!" I thought, "I shall make her a lovely gold tiny engagement ring charm for said bracelet" Then I added a little gold heart for good measure...

Ta da!

It turned out super-cute I think :) I bought the tiny crown part that the stone sits in, but the rest of it I made from scratch out of gold sheet and wire, like a proper jeweller and everything!

And, with the magic of Lightroom, here's what it would look like in silver:

I hope she likes it and doesn't think it's totally cheesy...

I Has a Tree!

2009-12-23T04:28:00.000-08:00

Well, amidst the general chaos that has been my life this week, I have managed to put up the tree. Flatmate managed to move his arse off the sofa for just long enough to get it out of the loft.

We first moved into this house at the end of November three years ago, and decided to throw a Christmas party on the first weekend in December, figuring it would give us motivation to build furniture and stuff.

So, we acquired a tree, but decided to make our party a "Bring a Bauble" party. So, all of our friends brought us a random bauble each to put on the tree and by the end of the party it was full. I love the fact that it's the most ludicrously mismatched tree ever :)

Now How Did That Happen...?

2009-12-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

It has come to my attention that today is December 20th. DECEMBER 20TH!!!! How can December have possibly snuck up on me like that? Not even snuck, actually, but merrily legged it past me waving tinsel and blowing rasperries!

I have done nothing towards Christmas at all. Eek! I've been so busy this month with making shiny things and flat hunting that Christmas hasn't even really occurred to me. Although thanks to my mother, I have had mince pies and she even made me a Christmas cake :)

I am now going to put up the Christmas tree, then I will feel slightly better. Maybe I will make mince pies too...

Christmas Cupcakes

2009-12-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Wow, busy week!

London Rollergirls had their season opening bout on Saturday. We gave it a Christmassy theme, just because it was December. Sadly, my favourite team lost the game, but I did get to make some rather yummy Christmas themed cupcakes.

These were mince pie cupcakes with brandy butter icing. Sounds weird, totally works.

And a less alarming sounding lemon and blueberry flavour with sugarpaste snowflakes:

I love cake :)

Silver Essex Necklace

2009-12-10T12:34:00.000-08:00

This has been one of my favourite projects! Silver “Essex” name necklace, custom designed with the triple sword logo from the Essex flag incorporated.

So, I think it turned out really well and I was really happy with it. It’s always difficult to let the shiny things go after spending so many hours with them, especially this one, but sadly I had to wave goodbye. Can I please move to Essex so I can make one for me...?

Anyway, here is the finished shiny thing:

And a detail shot of the tiny swords:

I messed around with some different setups for the photography this time, using blue/green acrylic stars as props. I like the effect, but I’m not sure whether it makes the picture look too busy...?

I also found a new and exciting icon in Lightroom, which seems to allow you to drag a gradient of different colour or exposure across the picture. I’m not really sure what I’m doing with it, or it’s proper purpose, but I’ve been playing with it anyway :)

Oh, and I also got another commission for a name necklace, which I was working on at the same time. This font was an absolute arse to cut out, but it ended up being really pretty, so I forgave it.

There are still unfinished shiny things on my workbench, so I'll try and get some pictures of them before they leave me for their new owners...

Tea at the Ritz!

2009-12-01T01:08:00.000-08:00

Poor little neglected blog. I have been ludicrously busy over the past few weeks and have sadly not had time to write about stuff.

So, what have I been doing? Well, firstly I must tell you about the rather marvellous time the boy and I had at the Ritz a couple of Fridays ago. We had been given an afternoon tea there as a lovely Christmas gift from the boy’s mum and finally found a date to book it. Friday afternoons off work are always nice, but for this one I got to wear a posh frock, potter down to Green Park and enter another world.

The decor is amazing, completly my style with lots of gilt baroque swirly things (interior design terms not my strong point I’m afraid...), beautifully upholstered chairs and sofas and more chandeliers than you can shake a stick at. Check it out:

Now, on to the important bit... the cake obviously! I love cake. I may have mentioned this previously. Anyway, they give you this fab three tiered cake stand thingy, with adorable little sandwiches (crusts cut off, obvs) on the bottom and little confectionery works of art on the top. Oh, and there were cucumber sandwiches! I can now say I have eaten cucumber sandwiches at the Ritz :)

Then, to fill the middle layer, you are presented with warm scones and a pot of jam and fresh clotted cream. Now usually, I am a bit “meh, whatever” about scones, but these were a revelation! The ones I make you could break windows with, but these were all light and fluffy and marvellous.

So, all in all it was a super-fun Friday afternoon. We took a walk up Bond Street afterwards and looked at all the amazing sparkly things in the posh jewellers. I did want to take some pictures, but the giant black clad bodyguards with the earpieces didn’t look like they’d be overly impressed. So I didn’t. But, I did manage to get a picture of this little fellow as we passed a window, as he amused me:

What is it? Silver chicken/dragon hybrid? I have no idea what it’s for but it’s kind of cool in a disturbing kind of way.

Anyway, must dash (again) but with promises of new shiny things very soon.

Shiny Things! ...Work in Progress

2009-11-09T03:04:00.000-08:00

As my boyfriend abandoned me this weekend for a lads day/night, then subsequent hangover, I actually got to be super-constructive! More lads nights please guys :) So, I spent pretty much all weekend making jewellery (save for a break to watch X-Factor, obvs...).

I had a lovely time with tiny saw blades and hitting things with hammers and didn’t want to come back to work this morning. I wish making jewellery was my real job...

Anyway, I thought I’d share a couple of pictures of my work in progress.

First, a very cool Essex name necklace in silver for one of my favourite Essex girls from LRG:

I was really excited to do this one, as I love the font she chose, and also, I really wanted to be able to work a triple sword logo charm from the Essex flag into it somehow.

I think it’s going to look awesome when it’s finished and will be a good portfolio piece for my (eventual) website if I can get some good shots of it. Sadly, my fabulous new camera is currently still at coveting stage, as renovating a bathroom and moving house is kind of expensive. Booooooo.

Anyway, my second project of the weekend was a name necklace commissioned as an Xmas pressie. I really like this font too, even though it was a bit of an arse to cut out, as it’s so fiddly. It’s looking good so far though, just needs a polish and chain added.

So, that's mainly what I've been doing. Design stuff is going pretty well too, just need some time to actually make it now...

Spooky Goings On...

2009-11-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

Just for a change, I’ve had a mental busy week. Had a rather fab Halloween, which involved going to my lovely friend Amy’s wedding reception, then off to Torture Garden, which was pretty fun. Totally amazing decoration, including one room that had been turned into a massive forest in the middle of the club, complete with twinkling stars overhead, leaves underfoot and even a proper foresty smell. Awesome! I want to dress as a vampire every day please.

In jewellery news, I also started work on a couple of name necklaces, which are looking really good, and have done a ton of designs for new earrings. So much to do in the next few weeks though, eek!

Halloween Cocktail Hats and Fascinators

2009-10-21T06:12:00.000-07:00

Right, back to making stuff now...

I've been so busy with work and other randomness, shiny things have rather fallen by the wayside. However, a thing on my do-to list was to learn how to make fabric roses and, inspired by Halloween, I made some little hats as kind of an experiment. As experiments go, they turned out pretty good :)

First one was a little white satin and spiderweb lace creation, with some black and white feathers and black satin roses...

The fabric roses took a bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, they're pretty easy. I made a red one too, thought I'd get a bit fancy, and covered the roses with the spiderweb lace too...

I also randomly purchased a little hot glue gun from John Lewis whilst I was buying sewing needles, which is possibly the best thing ever! It made attaching the feathers and roses sooooo much quicker than stitching them all by hand, and seeing as I stitch the rest of the hats by hand, I think I'm allowed a little time saving every now and again ;)

Happy (Very Belated...) Birthday to Me!

2009-10-21T05:42:00.000-07:00

I have been super-busy, hence not much posting recently, but I took a couple of well-needed days of work and pottered off back to my little island at the beginning of this month for my birthday. It was lovely, actually, as I can never normally be bothered to do anything for my birthday. This year, however, I got a perfect day of walking by the sea in the sunshine, going to the zoo (meerkats and fruitbats... squeal!!!!), then lovely mum-cooked roast dinner and some awesome cupcakes that mum bought me. I did take a picture, but only after we'd scoffed most of them :)

I also got to meet mum's gorgeous new cat, Pudding, who is like a big fluffy teddybear. She also turned out to be somewhat camera-shy and refused to show me her cute little face. Booooo. But here she is...

I WANT A CAT!!!!!!!

Lori Earley - New Art Crush

2009-10-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

Obsessed as I currently am with all things baroque, I accidentally stumbled across an artist by the name of Lori Earley yesterday. She paints beautiful and strange portraits and, excitingly, has an exhibition opening on October 16th at Opera Gallery in London, so I can go and look at the art close up, yay!

Check out more of her work here, as she is awesome:

http://www.loriearley.com/gallery/

Strange Dreams...

2009-09-18T06:28:00.000-07:00

This week I have been mainly having dreams where I am getting my roots done. Apparently, even my subconscious thinks my hair is horrible...

Silver Christening & Birthstone Charms

2009-09-15T06:49:00.001-07:00

I have only made one so far, but have been playing with a rather lovely new computer program called Lightroom, which I discovered allows me to select small areas of a photograph and "paint" new colour over them. Amazing! And so much easier than Photoshop.

So, this here is the original photograph, with a ruby for July:

Some deepening of the colour gets us to this, which is garnet, for January. Still red, just a little darker, so not that impressive, you might think...

...but check this out! Desaturating, upping the exposure then painting layers of semi-transparent purple colours gets us a pretty accurate rendering of an amethyst, birthstone for February:

And so on. We have aquamarine for March...

Diamond for April...

Emerald for May...

Sadly, June is still missing, as the birthstone is a pearl, and even the fabulousness that is Lightroom can't turn a faceted stone into a smooth and even coloured pearl. Booooo.

But, we have peridot for August...

Sapphire for September...

Opal for October...

Citrine for November...

And finally, blue topaz for December.

Sadly, Adobe will only let you have a 30 day free trial of Lightroom. Booooo. Something to do with them wanting you to actually pay for the program or something...

But, I love it so much that I may well do that. Maybe. When I have some spare cash...

Charm Bracelet for a Christening

2009-09-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Hello! As usual, things have been manic recently. This weekend was Luke's little brother's wedding, which was lovely, and last weekend my cousin had her beautiful little girl, Milly, christened.

As it's traditional to give silver for a christening gift, I thought I'd have a go at a personalised charm bracelet with Milly's name carved into a silver oval, and a flower with her birthstone, which is ruby. I'm happy that Milly is following in the family tradition by deciding to have expensive tastes before she was even born! Go Milly!

Anyway, here it is:

I may write some more about it later, but at the moment I'm at work, having had hardly any sleep and commuted in from somewhere in Essex after the wedding. Very, very sleepy... zzzzzzzzzzzz........

Canadian Cupcakes

2009-09-10T01:07:00.000-07:00

A rather hectic time was had last weekend, as I frantically baked and iced cupcakes, tried to tidy the house, and also make a silver charm bracelet for a christening (more of which later).

So, my flatmate Yuri turned 40 and arranged a little party in a rather nice pub in Canonbury, the Marquess Tavern, which I've not been to for ages and is happily staggering distance from our house. Even though I wasn't actually drinking...

Anyway, I made some Canadian/birthday themed little cupcakes, with maple leaves and 40s cut out of red sugarpaste, with red and white frosting swirls. I even made them maple and pecan flavour...

Tada!

Roller Derby Charms - New Photography!

2009-09-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

Unhappy as I was with my recent photography exploits, my lovely friend Dan arranged for his photographer friend, Paul, to come over and take some new pictures for me. And he was happy to be paid in beer! I wish more people would work for beer, it would make my life much easier. Dear Mr Website Designer, please could I have a website? Here is some beer. Sadly, things don't work like that in real world. Sigh...

Anyway, I digress. Paul turned up with a massive camera (it turns out that yes, size does matter...) and a ton of flash guns.

And here are the results:

Much better, yes?

So, now I just need to get me one of those big cameras, some photography knowledge and learn how to build a website and I'll be sorted. Simples!

More Shiny Things!

2009-08-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

My mother, much to her annoyance, turned 60 this year. So, seeing as a 60th wedding anniversary should be celebrated with diamonds, a 60th birthday should too, no?

I got to feel like a real proper jeweller, going off to Hatton Garden to buy the stones. It's amazing how much more attention the sales staff pay you when you say "I would like to buy some diamonds please"!

So diamonds purchased, white gold sheet acquired and design finalised, I extremely carefully cut it out of the sheet metal, using the worlds tiniest sawblades. And I only broke one, go me! I bought a pack of 24, assuming I'd break one every two minutes, given how fine they were. I should have more faith...

Soldering was pretty scary, as I've not soldered anything but silver for years, but the scariest bit by far was the diamond setting. I was so scared I was going to drop one on the floor, never to be seen again.

But, it all turned out okay, hurrah! I'd forgotton how exhausting stone setting is, requiring as it does a particularly annoying combination of intense concentration, delicate movements and a large dose of brute force.

Anyway, here they are:

And they are both shiny and sparkly! Mum hates anything dangly, so I went with small stud earrings instead. It was quite difficult to combine this with my fondness for big swirly designs, but I think I managed to pull it off and I am actually really happy with the way they turned out.

Back to Shiny Things Now

2009-08-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

Well, given the title of this blog, it's high time I posted some more shiny things, no?

A busy little bee I have been over the past few weeks with parties and weddings galore to attend, but I did find the time to make something for my lovely friend Nem, which was a necklace for her equally lovely girlfriend. She skates for the London Rollergirls' Suffrajets, whose logo looks like this:

So, Nem and I decided to take the font from the logo, play around a bit, and make up a necklace using her skate name, which is Silky Briefs. I cut the whole thing out of one big piece of silver sheet, engraving on letter details as needed. Here's a little work in progress shot...

And the final product ended up like this:

I was really happy with how it turned out and hopefully the birthday girl was too!

Cupcake Queen

2009-08-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

I was going through random photographs on the hard drive and came across a ton of pictures of cupcakes that I've made over the past couple of years, so I thought I'd put them as a little group here. It's been a while since I had time to make any, which makes me sad. Also, my absolute favourite ones, with green icing grass and marzipan bees, I have no photographs of. Maybe that's a good excuse to make more...

These were one of my very first attempts at cupcake icing, for a London Rollergirls fundraiser.

And another fundraiser, this time with a bonfire night theme, hence tiny icing flames on logs made from Cadbury's flake. I made the cupcakes ginger flavoured and everything...

These were for my friend Jennie's birthday, which is also Valentines Day, so I decorated them all with pretty pink icing swirls and hearts.

Another friend's birthday cupcakes here. She's called Sky, hence blue icing swirls and sugarpaste clouds.

And back to London Rollergirls, these were made for a bout between two of our league teams, the Ultraviolent Femmes and the Steamrollers, and iced with swirls in their respective team colours. Turns out it's really difficult to dye buttercream dark red...

And for the season championship, cupcakes in the LRG league colours of pink and black. The green ones in these pictures were made by Metallikat and had the yummiest icing I've ever tasted!
And that's it! My flatmate turns 40 next weekend, so I shall be making Canadian themed ones, possibly with sugarpaste 40s if I can find tiny enough number cutters...

Hello...

2009-08-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

It's been at least a couple of weeks since I've been able to post, partly because my actual day job has been super-busy, thus interfering with creativity slightly (how dare it!) and partly because the flatmate's computer is becoming increasinly slow and grumpy when asked to do anything photography related. I think the hamsters may be on their last legs.

So, what have I been doing?

Clearing out my wardrobe for a start. We have a new lodger in our spare room, which means I no longer have the use of two full double bedrooms to keep my stuff in. Having been reduced one one bedroom, it has occurred to me that I own way too many clothes, yet wear my favourite things all the time. I managed to sell a ton of stuff on Ebay, which is very satisfying, but also pretty time consuming and dull. Need to do another pass now, but more ruthlessly.

Also, I went to Torture Garden for the first time ever. It was much fun and not at all scary and I've never been chatted up so politely in my entire life! The night had a nautical theme, which gave me the excuse to buy a rather fabulous sailor corset that I've been coveting for some time.

It's from a company called Boobie Trap Corsets, who make beautiful things and have the best customer service ever. I think I now have enough corsets to call it a collection. Some people collect crystal animals, or china frogs, or whatever. I shall collect corsets.

And this is me wearing it (sadly I look nowhere near as good as Boobie Trap's cute model, but considering how shocking I normally look in photos, I quite like this one)

I have also been making shiny things, hurrah! More on this later, but for now I must get back to work. The Employment Tribunal beckons...

Nautical Hats/Fascinators

2009-07-27T00:31:00.000-07:00

They are now available in my store - http://www.laurenandgrace.etsy.com/, together with the bumblebee and ladybug hats. Yay!

It turns out that my camera is much happier about taking pictures of hats than it is about small shiny things.

Finished the mannequin head on Saturday night, then did a little hat photoshoot. I think they turned out okay, and definitely way better than my original hat pictures!

And here they are...

Silver Roller Derby Charms and Photography Fail

2009-07-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

Thought I'd best have a go at photographing the new charms.

Sadly, it turns out my camera is a bit rubbish at capturing shiny things and refuses to focus most of the time. Eep!

Did a bit of research on the interwebs and have decided I would either like a Canon SX10 IS or a Canon G10. Currently, I cannot afford either, as they're both around £300, but I figured if I can clear out my wardrobe and sell enough stuff on Ebay to pay for it, that's like getting a free camera, right...?

Anyway, after much muttering and a large glass of wine, I managed to get a couple of shots that are kind of okay, and will do for now until I can afford a better camera.

So, there you go. I now need to learn how to be a jammer, as that helmet's my favourite I think. If you've ever seen me skate, you will realise how likely that is to happen ;)

Now I just need to finish the mannequin head and get some decent shots of the hats. It has progressed slightly and now looks like this:

Still needs some more work. That is what I shall be doing tonight, seeing how the bank says I'm not allowed to go out and all...

Roll Britannia

2009-07-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

Well, it's over.

I had a great weekend and got to see a ton of people I've not seen for ages, due to my self-imposed social exile, and also see some great roller derby games.

London Rollergirls emerged victorious after two days of solid roller derby, beating the Birmingham Blitz Derby Dames by 346 points to 13. Eek! Glad I got to see the Birmingham v. Edinburgh game too, as it was so close and very exciting. First prize for style, attitude and unicorns definitely belonged to Team East Angrier though :)

And, all the hard work I put into the stall was definitely worth it, yay! Here it is:

Everyone was so lovely and positive about the silver derby helmet and stripey sock charms and I sold things to a couple of complete strangers as well as my friends, which was very exciting. I didn't even come close to covering the costs of doing this, but it didn't matter a tiny bit!

I even had my own lovely hat model. I think it kind of suits him :)

To be honest, even if I hadn't sold a single thing, it really wouldn't have mattered. Having the deadline of Roll Britannia to work to gave me a real kick up the bum to start making stuff again, otherwise I would probably still be in the middle of the circle of eternal procrastination, where I often find myself. But now that I have lots of lovely new (not to mention alarmingly expensive) tools and equipment, I'll definitely be carrying on with the making of stuff. I have my next collection all designed in my head and have even put pencil to paper so am very excited to be starting on the new stuff.

Thanks to everyone who was lovely and supported me and put up with my tired grumpiness :)

This weekend was also ace due to getting to hang out with Amy Nitrate, formerly of the London Rollergirls and textile maker extrodinaire, on Saturday, who has been running her own creative business for ages and gave me loads of tips and advice on one day starting mine.

Oh, and I spent some of my profits on this rather fab Licorice Allsorts bracelet from the lovely ladies at Short and Girly ( http://www.shortandgirly.co.uk/ ) who also had a stall this weekend. I keep wanting to eat it, but am assured that they don't taste nearly as good as they look...

So, onwards and upwards. Tonight I will be mainly remembering what an arse it is to take pictures of tiny, but very reflective, things whilst trying to access the part of my brain that remembers what an f-stop is.

I am doomed.

The Countdown Begins

2009-07-17T06:16:00.000-07:00

One day to go until Roll Britannia! Eep!

Stayed up until 3:00am this morning making my tablecloth. Very much wish my living room was at least 6 foot bigger in each direction. Suspect tablecloth may be miles to big, but I will artfully drape if that is the case.

Boxes have arrived to put hats in. Also, against all odds and blowing rasperries in the general direction of Royal Mail and its strike, my cute little black and pink jewellery boxes arrived at work this morning. I now wish I hadn't spent yesterday afternoon running round and spending money I don't have to buy more boxes. Bumhats!

Anyway, this evening I will be mostly soldering jump rings onto tiny silver stripey sock charms and trying to finish little hats. And possibly collapsing.

So, my first ever stall happens tomorrow! Even if I'm not quite ready, and even if I don't sell anything, I've learned a whole bunch of stuff in the past couple of months and given it everything I've got. I can say for definite that I couldn't have worked any harder, so all in all I'm pretty happy with what I've achieved, especially given my tendancies to self-doubt.

I'll let you know how it goes. Wish me luck...

And We're in Business

2009-07-13T06:17:00.000-07:00

After a super-hectic weekend, I finally got around to playing with Photoshop. You may have noticed that my blog has had a little bit of a makeover, yay! I've designed my own header and changed it from it's previous gloomy black. What do we think? I think a white background is always easier to read, no?

Anyway, it's been a good 5 years or so since I even peeked a glance at Photoshop, so it was an interesting experience. On opening up the program again for the first time, I mainly just stared blankly at the screen, going "huh?" That didn't really get me anywhere, so I pretended I was in Star Trek and tried yelling at it. "Make file bigger! And....go! I said go! File...bigger...? Help...?" Yeah, that didn't work either. Eventually googled Photoshop instructions. Apparently, it's Edit, Transform, Scale. Of course it is. Obvious really... :)

I did finally get the hang of it, and happily my refusal to flatten any of my previous images meant they were all fairly easy to mess about with.

So, here is my business card design:

I wanted to keep it pretty simple and also wanted to stick with the heart type logo that my old flatmate (somewhat of a graphics genius) designed for me. I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, but I've had to order them via an internet business card type place, so I've no idea how they'll turn out. Fingers crossed they look okay...

I also bought some rather lovely (and expensive - eep!) fabric to make a table cover out of:

There will be a panel of this in the centre, with a black panel either side, as I couldn't afford to do the whole thing in this stuff. I'll hopefully have time to edge it with rope cord and put some little tassles on the corners too, but suspect this may be a little over-ambitious...

I Survived!

2009-07-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

Obviously :)

My house also survived my blowtorch experiments and I've not yet blown anything up, hurrah! Actually, the blowtorch is rather wondrous and lovely and soldering with it is super-easy, like a billion times easier than with the old ones. Because it gets hotter, so the solder melts quicker, see? It felt a bit unwieldy to start with, but by the end of the day I was merrily waving it around in my left hand so my right hand was free to poke hot things with tweezers. Yay! I have now been admiring my perfect little solder joins, and all helmets now have chinstraps and a little ring on top to dangle them. Oooh, and I soldered teeny tiny bolt rings onto fine chain with no problems either. I love my new blowtorch soooooo much! I may have mentioned that...

So, whilst initially the synchronised death of all my old equipment seemed like the end of the world, from a financial point of view especially, it turned out to be a good thing, as the new stuff is so much easier to use and saves much time and frustration.

I actually feel like a proper jeweller for the first time ever :)

I Has a Blowtorch

2009-07-05T02:29:00.000-07:00

Wheeeeeee! Blowtorch finally arrived at work, along with my lovely barrel polishing machine. Was a bit scared taking the torch home on the bus, as I thought the combination of hot weather and bus vibration might make it explode. The boy pointed out I was being a retard and I did have to concede that he was correct after making it home without incident.

Slightly alarmingly, the instructions made a whole lot of assumptions that if you were buying this piece of pretty dangerous equipment, you probably had a pretty good general idea of how it works. Alas, no. It sat in my living room glaring malevolently at me for a couple of days, before the boy and I finally took it outside and, using a combination of the instructions and looking at the picture on the front of the box eventually figured out how it was supposed to fit together and made the required tiny blue flame. Which, it turns out, is very hot. Who knew...?

Anyway, did some practicing on scrap silver and generally melted stuff. Eep! The flame burns way hotter than my old torch and I think I'm going to need some practice before I start on the helmets. Also, soldering outside on a hot sunny day is not really ideal, as you can't see the metal do the glowy thing it does just before it melts, so today I will try again, but indoors, and with a bit more care and attention.

Also, I just changed a tire on my bicycle all by myself, as I'd been getting a ton of punctures so purchased a new armoured road tire. It was a bit of a struggle, but am happy I got it done with no help whatsoever from boys, yay!

Off to play with the torch now. If I don't burn my house down, I'll let you know how it goes...

Tiny Silver Crash Helmets

2009-07-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

They have arrived! Picked them up from the casters earlier this week at a cost of £200. Eek! Although, I had made a vaguely educated guess at £150 from some previous castings I had done about 5 years ago from a different place, so I guess my estimate wasn't far off. I had rather hoped I was over-estimating though. Future casting runs will be cheaper, but I had to pay the initial costs of having four molds made this time.

But they do look cute :) Much better quality casting than the old place I used too, as I got a recommendation from my friend Dave, who is a proper jeweller and knows stuff.

So, without further ado, here is a pile of little crash helmets:

This is how they come back from the caster, with little wires sticking out, called sprues, which are used to pour the molten metal into the mold. Now I just need to saw them off, give the castings a quick sand, solder on the little chin strap to each one and then chuck them in my new barrel polisher, which I have decided to invest in and which arrives on Friday. Yay!

I also played with my new drill briefly this evening. I love it! Drilled a 0.8mm hole through 3.2mm silver sheet in about 3 seconds, wheeeeeeee!

My new blowtorch is sadly yet to arrive though. I really hate companies who guarantee delivery by a certain date, yet entirely fail to actually deliver it on said date. Bah! Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow though...

And Now I am Bankrupt...

2009-06-30T13:09:00.001-07:00

Okay, that may be a teensy bit of an exaggeration. Drama queen? Moi? Surely not...

After perusing all that the interwebs had to offer, I managed to find a cute little oxy/gas welding torch for £158 including delivery, which is rather cheaper than I had been quoted by a jewellery tool store at Earls Court last year. I have ordered it and think it may arrive tomorrow. This be the one:

The tanks are about 30cm high, from what I can remember, and it means that I can now solder 18k gold and platinum, my old blowtorch having a maximum flame temperature of 1300 degrees and this one having a maximum of 3100! I am slightly scared that it will spontaneously combust as soon as I let it out of my sight, taking my poor little house with it. Eep!

Anyway, on top of this, my old flex shaft Dremel, which I've had for about 10 years, blew up on Saturday :( This means I'm entirely screwed when it comes to drilling, sanding or polishing anything. You know, all the important stuff. Replacing it with a proper jeweller's pendant motor, which I have been coveting for many a year while the Dremel made its whirry complaining noises at me and stopped spinning at random intervals, turns out to be a minimum of £270. *faints*

But, I did eventually find one that looks like, and appears to have the same specs as the posh jeweller's one, it's just unbranded, for £102 including delivery. As there is not a chance in hell I could afford the £270 one, I ordered it with firmly crossed fingers. It arrived at work today, comfortingly weighing about as much as a small elephant. I cycled it home in 30 degree heat, followed the instructions and screwed all the bits together. And it's totally awesome! I've not put any tools in it yet, as you're supposed to run them unloaded for a little bit just to get all the parts spinning smoothly, but it's a million times more powerful than the Dremel and much more stable and smooth. Hurrah! I can now drill holes with abandon!

Here it is:

Sadly, due to the suicide pact undertaken by all of my equipment, the lovely barrel polisher which would save me untold hours of time and effort is no longer financially within my grasp :( The good thing is that I did get a bonus from work this month, which means that I've only been spending "free" money, otherwise I would have been royally screwed, but with the blowtorch, the drill and money I've set aside to pay for castings, the free money has now sadly run out. Booooo.

In conclusion, I now have shiny new tools, but am still miles behind, timewise, for Roll Britannia. Backing slowly away from the internet now and off to do something hat related.

Disconnected...

2009-06-26T05:08:00.000-07:00

Updating has been rather difficult of late, mainly because my work internet and email connection has been entirely broken for the past two weeks. It's like living in the 80s and I have sent many faxes.

But, stuff and things have been happening on the jewellery front. I found a place in Dulwich that does open studio on Monday nights, which is a bit easier to get to than the Amersham one. It's called the London Jewellery School and is run by Jessica, who is lovely and said I can call them any time to arrange to pop down and fire stuff in the kiln.

So, the helmets are now finished and have been sent to the caster to be molded and I get them back on Monday. I've not had anything cast for years and have no clue how much the cost per piece will be, so I've just ordered 10 each of the helmet designs and 30 chin straps. Couldn't cast it as one piece sadly, so I'll have to solder on each chin strap individually. Bum.

I have three weeks left until Roll Britannia and am feeling a bit despondent about stuff, as I don't think I have enough time to make everything :( The skate is still giving me trouble, as making all the trucks/axles/plate bit of it turned out to be a nightmare. Having never used the silver clay before, I am realising its limitations for small and detailed work, as it's quite fragile and tends to break when you're working on it. Am going to start over this evening and carve/saw/file the plate out of a chunk of thick silver sheet. Fingers crossed...

Also, the caster said I might have to cast the skate in two parts, as there's a lot of undercutting and the metal won't flow into the mold properly if it's all one piece. Which again increases the manufacturing cost per piece. Also, having to solder the base plate to each skate after casting will be a pain in the bum, mainly because my tiny and ancient blowtorch (still using the same one you bought me after college Mum :)) will not get hot enough for solder to flow on a chunky piece of silver.

Bah! This totally turned into a whingy post and I didn't mean it to. Trying not to be negative and just going to keep at it and give it every hour I have, as if I give up now then I'll never know whether I would have been ready in time. That made no sense. I'm going to eat cake now.

OMG, Faith No More!

2009-06-11T05:24:00.000-07:00

An old friend from college, Kerry, offered me her spare ticket for the entirely sold out Faith No More gig at Brixton last night. Not only was it lovely to see Kerry again, the gig was completely amazing!

Having not had the chance to see them live the first time round, due to growing up on a, whilst admittedly beautiful, very difficult to escape small island, I had no idea how awesome they would be. For a band that hasn't played a show together in 12 years, they were incredibly tight and Mike Patton's vocals were outstanding (and he was still beautiful. Sigh...). Sometimes when you see a band live, there's a certain amount of disappointment when they're not quite as musically talented as the cds would have you believe, but that was totally not the case here.

They didn't play Ashes to Ashes, but most of my other favourites were in there and I can definitely say it's up there with my favourite gigs of all time :)

P.S. My ears hurt. Am I getting old, or is Brixton's sound system getting louder...?

Rollerskates, Cupcakes and a Streaker

2009-06-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

Well, a rather fab time was had on Saturday, with London Rollergirls' A and B teams lining up to play the Birmingham Blitzdames and the Leeds Rollerdolls respectively.

They really were fantastic games to watch, with London Brawling and Brawl Saints both emerging victorious, hurrah!

And.... we had our first streaker. We have now officially arrived :)

Check out the awesome highlights video from The Baron:

The night before continued my pre-bout tradition of icing cupcakes at midnight, but they still turned out okay. Picture to follow...

And Now I Want a Kiln...

2009-06-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday at The PMC Studio in Amersham. They are lovely and hold open studio days at the beginning of every month, where you can use all their stuff for the bargain price of £15 for the day. Amersham was slightly further away than I had realised. It's on the tube map, so I just assumed it was in London, but it's actually Buckinghamshire. I am a retard.

Anyway, finally got there and I was the only person to have turned up to the open studio, so I got a huge table full of tools and a kiln all to myself, yay!

At the weekend I'd made some small head shapes out of wood clay (which burns away in the kiln) to sculpt my little crash helmets on, but it turned out that the semi-dried clay helmets were pretty easy to remove from the heads, so ended up just using one and sculpting all of the helmets on it and removing them:

So... I made a pivot helmet, a jammer one, and a vaguely LRG related one with a little Union Jack logo on the back. They are a wee bit wonky, but I was aiming for slightly cartoon-like, rather than super-realism, so I have decided the wonkiness adds to their charm. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway....

Sanded them all down, took a deep breath and plonked them in the kiln. Having never used a kiln before I was expecting explosions, melting and all sorts of carnage, but they happily emerged after 10 minutes of firing mainly intact, save for a couple of cracks. Yay! I really, really want a kiln now...

Anyway, here they are.

This is the little jammer helmet. My 2 years work of cake decorating tools are coming in super-useful for the silver clay work :) Can I still use them on icing now I wonder...?

This is actually pure silver! Doesn't look like it right? Things emerge from the kiln a kind of matt grey/white colour, then you scrub them with a stainless steel brush and the silver shine starts to come through.

This is the little LRG inspired one:

And the pivot one:

This is what they look like once they've been scrubbed with the stainless steel brush. You can then make them proper shiny by rubbing them with a burnisher.

I really want to now add a chin strap to the helmets, but I fear this will scupper any chance of making a mould and casting multiple copies. Arse. Do they look a bit funny without the chin strap though...?

But, anyway, the little helmets did turn out much better than I was expecting, given that I've been using silver clay for less than a week and given my utter fail at sculpting practice with the Fimo. Silver clay may now be my new favourite thing :)

Did I mention that I want a kiln...?