It has been a busy year for me and ended (almost) with my most ambitious project yet; to make every member of my family a present for Christmas, this meant three faceted flower pendants for the little girls, four spectrolite pendants for the ladies, a plume agate pendant for an honourary family member, an eagle pin, a Star Wars key-ring, a pierced set of Chinese rabbit cufflinks, an emerald earring and two surfer shell necklets with birthstones..phew! As the run up to the holidays had been busy with preparation for a final show, I had set time aside for these pieces closer to Christmas, unfortunately I hadn't planned for the flu and ended up making all of these over the very short space of time of two days, quite an accomplishment and only four hours sleep, but I did manage it.
As a result I have stayed away from the bench for a few days, but now the time has come to get back into the swing! Before the rush I had just begun to go back to the copper jewellery that started my whole foray into silversmithing. For a few years now, I have been playing quite happily with fusing copper and melting silver to the surface with some very pretty results. I have designed some new pierced pieces to make in this way, which may, also be available in sterling later but for now are staying in copper with silver findings. This is mostly because the cost of silver at the moment makes me blanche a little, but also because the copper is so pretty and deserves to be shown off a little more. So over the next couple of dats I will be extending my new copper birthsign earrings range, pierced pendants with crow and cat designs and some variations of the Twiggies earrings that I am so in love with at the moment. I hope you enjoy, and do not worry, I am still playing with silver and have just ordered (gulp!) some tubing to make hinges with, hopefully I won't be wasting too much of it :)
