Made Over the Weekend

I made a plain sterling silver band a few weeks ago and I knew I wanted to attach it onto something, but I just didn't know what. I started playing with a piece off copper over the weekend and intended to make a pendant or a piece for a bracelet. Once I soldered the feather design on I happened to look at the ring shank and thought,"ooh, this is what I should attach!" It's a pretty big ring and I love how it turned out. I purposely made the copper portion not perfectly rounded to give it a rustic feel and banged it up a bit on the edges.

I also made a few pairs of earrings the same day.
I played around with different tools to see what kind of marks they would leave on the metal. The first one was just supposed to be a test piece and when it was done I thought it looked kind of neat and made it a friend.

 I think I am calling the pair below-stick earrings.

PS. I just made homemade rice krispy treats and I foresee me eating way to many in the near future! 3 ingredients and so stinking yummy!

Me and Mose

Rings

 Raw Amethyst

 Rutilated Quartz

Try to ignore my dry nasty hands! ;)

Stuff

 *My mom told me about the show Doc Martin. Have you seen it? We both have Netflix watch instantly and I am always looking for new things to add to my que. I love a lot of the BBC movies so I started watching Doc and I am a bit obsessed.

*I was reading this book until I watched a documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright and realized where this love affair was heading. It's REALLY gruesome and depressing and I moved onto this book. Which is depressing, but interesting. Have any recommendations for the next book I should pick up?

*I have been playing around with wire and wire wrapping a lot in the past few days. I made this really fun wrapped reticulated quartz ring that I will share with you eventually and have been making some earrings as well. I absolutely love silver-smithing, but I just can't really afford to work with the sterling silver sheet right now. Discovering wire wrapping and really just working with wire in general has been a really nice distraction. I also love shopping for new stones and beads to work with. I feel like I am 10 again adding new rocks to my rock collection.

 *My husband is building us a fence! It is almost finished, but here are some pictures I snapped last weekend

side note- My husband is awesome! He can build and fix anything. Seriously-ANYTHING! It's amazing and I am so blessed he has these talents!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Starting Out

I am no expert at all on jewelry making, but I think one small piece of advice I would give to someone wanting to make jewelry with beads and stones is to only buy beads and stones that you REALLY like.

Long ago in my teens when I first started wanting to make jewelry I went to the local craft store and bought a bunch of cheap beads in every color. I thought that if I had them in every color then I was covered for whatever type of project I wanted to do. The same went with ear wires and other things like that. Cheap.
Even when I became an adult I kept buying ugly cheap beads because I didn't want to pay more for the better stuff. I always wondered why I never liked the final product.

What I have come to realize is if you start with pretty materials to begin with you really don't have to do anything fancy to end up with something nice that you will actually want to wear or give as a gift.

I am thinking about this right now because I just purchased several beads from various Etsy sellers and can't wait for them to show up in the mail. I received one of the packages today with several large nuggets of turquoise. I took them out and instantly wanted to make something. I whipped up this wire wrapped ring and I love it. It's so simple, but when you are working with stones you love you can let the stone speak for the piece on it's own.

I am off to make some dinner!

Rainy Day

Reading this
Listening to this
Just finished these

Learning

Today has been sort of a boring day. There wasn't much to be done. I finished the book I have been reading last night, I cleaned the house, and although I wanted to try and make something today I just wasn't in the mood. I sat there for a moment and decided to just go sit in my little craft room. Kind of hoping it would spark something. I only have a tiny amount of silver sheet left and knew I wasn't ready to finish it off. I pulled out this large thick sheet of copper and just looked at it in my hand, turning it over. I remembered a video I saw one time before I even took silversmithing classes on how to make a hollow form. I believe in the video they were making a hollow silver bead. I was actually thinking about that video last night before I went to bed. I tried to look for it today, but couldn't find it. I decided to give it a try anyways...with copper because I knew I would mess this up on my first try for sure. And I did. Over and Over. It seemed like every part of the process went wrong. I managed to get silver solder everywhere. Most of my copper looked silver by the time I was done and even though I filed and sanded I just couldn't get it all off. It seemed so bad I decided to stop right there and move onto something else. That something else actually ended really badly(oh boy it was bad!) too and as I sat there in a totally terrible defeated sort of mood for having wasted a lot of time and materials(I used some silver for the second project and a stone) I knew I just needed to walk away and find something else to do for a while.
Later on I stepped back in and picked up my first piece I worked on. It was ugly, but sort of cute and I had the energy to keep working with it. I am glad that I did because some how, by the grace of  God, it actually turned out pretty cute. Liver of Sulfur really saved this piece by blending all the silver and copper together in a not so obvious way.
Here she is....my little heart ring.