A Wonderful Move!

I'm pleased to announce that My Aphrodite jewelry is moving to new digs at http://www.myaphroditejewelry.com!

Please adjust your blogrolls accordingly! :)

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Thought I'd take some time to catch up on other happenings...

The Etsy UK Swap was a great success for everyone! I was all kinds of pleased to receive this lovely necklace and earring set from Lazy Giraffe as well as a super yummy batch of oaty biscuits to dunk in tea. Of course, it would be foolish to think that either me or the Mr. could be asked to wait for a cup of tea to boil when there were biscuits to be eaten. So we munched into the super crunchy sweetness and munched away until our jaws hurt, grinning like idiots. I debuted the necklace at the Hard Rock Calling festival on Saturday.

I'm now looking forward to the upcoming Cake Off/Bake Off that I've let myself in for. I'm fairly handy in the kitchen, although I have to work harder at baking than at day to day cooking. I must wait to see whom I am paired with, but I have a few ideas for baked goodness including:

-Shoo Fly Pie
-Some manner of hugely fattening cupcakes
-Grandma's Super Secret Sugar Cookie recipe

In happy promotional news, I've been chosen for a feature over on Maternal Spark! The feature will coincide with a blog giveaway that I'm planning in the near future, so be on the look out for both of those!

Happenings

I've been woefully neglectful of blogging my crafty capers of late, so I thought I'd catch up.

I had some serious good fortune in the last few weeks to have not one but TWO items on Etsy Front Pages thanks to treasury goddesses 3s and Lazy Giraffe which lead to an avalanche of hearts for which I am most grateful. Lazy's lovely orange and pink treasury features my Pining for Goshen pendant and 3's pinks and blues features my White Vinyard earrings. Here's hoping for more features in the future!

I've been spending a lot of time in creative mode lately as well. The gorgeous cabs and beads that I've bought from the Rock and Gem Show have been burning holes in their little storage bins, so I've done my best to rescue them from their plastic prison and get them into pieces. As you can see, in the previously mentioned "Envy" piece, the tourmaline and peridot beads have been encorperated and my new "White Lotus" pendants with marquis cut rainbow moonstone cabochons have emerged out of some of my show finds! Stones often inspire the shape of a piece, especially in the case of White Lotus; the marquis shape lends itself to long, elegant shapes.

Since receiving a heapin' helpin of beads in the post recently, I've been trying to decide how to use them to maximum effect and have come up with an earring style that can showcase a number of beautiful beads all at the same time.

Although it saves a fair amount of cash, I often have to pay import fees from American suppliers, so I spent a lot of time having to run out to the local sorting office to retrieve parcels being held for ransom by customs and excise. This week, I finally got a much needed shipment of beads and silver. Some of these beautiful garnet and garnet briolette beads made it into "The Temptation of Proserpine"; a luscious red pair of earrings representing the 6 pomegranate seeds that doomed Persephone to 6 months as year as the queen of the underworld with her abductor, Hades. I absolutely love how these turned out. I'm a bit of a garnet monkey, to be honest, so seeing this much garnety goodness in one place got me all hot and bothered.

On a slightly smaller scale, I wanted to show off some of the stunning citrine beads from my collection, so the "Limoncello" earrings were born. I often forget about citrine when creating; it's color is kind of pale and is easy to overlook when faced with a pile of vibrant beads all screaming, "PICK ME!", but put together in a cluster like this, they creates a cheerful, yet understated mood. They make me think of the drink who's name they share, which is completely scrummy, especially in the summertime. I am terribly tempted to make a pair of these for myself, but there is MUCH to be done before I can think about personal adornment!

I was really pleased to have also made a sale in the last week! My "Bombay Bride" earrings are now trundling their way across the country towards their new home. This sale edges me closer to my milestone 10th sale! The 10th customer, will of course, get a little extra treat with their purchase, so if anyone cares for a bit of shopping, please check out the shop.

Copper Madness

I've always been a silver girl but recently, my new surge of creativity has taken me in new directions, not to mention my own personal style as well.

I order my supplies from all over the damn place, so I often have to wait a small eternity for them to turn up on my doorstep. Of course, the worst thing for a silver smith to run out of is silver, so I decided to take my newfound love for big and relatively simple shapes into the realm of copper, which I can get easily and cheaply and can have a play with without worrying about ruining something potentially expensive.

My "Buzz, Buzz, Buttercup" pendant is one of the first large bits of copper that I've played with. Copper is a fairly friendly material to work with, especially while cutting. I can hardly describe it at anything but slightly more "powdery" than silver under the blade. Cuts are quicker.

I'm also finding uses for a massive reel of copper wire that I've had since my student days. It's just the right thickness for thin, hammered discs, which I love with the beautiful tear-drop amber beads that I've acquired. The color of these "Sundance" earrings is just fantastic.

Check them all out in the shop!

UK Challenge June-Seven Deadly Sins

I've been looking forward to this challenge for a while; big primal concepts like lust, greed and wrath make great and fertile pickings for jewelry design with a lot of choices for great stones and beads

I ended up choosing Envy as a subject matter because I was dying to use some of the gorgeous, green tourmaline cabs and peridot beads that I acquired at the rock and gem show.

I modified a "leaf" pattern that I've used on previous occasions to make it more angular, like a scowling brow. I liked the shape so much, I wanted to make a matching pair of earrings, so I came up with an internal shape that would look beautiful while dangling from a lovely earlobe.

Have also enjoyed seeing the other entries trickle in. I am definitely enamored and impressed with Paisley Chainsaw's magnificent and sinful bag.

The Pursuit of Shiny

Since reading His Dark Materials, I’ve invested a significant amount of thought into what the nature of my daemon might be. Everyone, I imagine, would like to think that they’d have an impressive physical manifestation of their true self but the truth is that some people are wormy. Or froggy. Or platypus like. As much as I’d like to think that my soul is cuddly and warm, the truth is that I believe that my daemon would probably be a magpie. I don’t mean to imply that I have a Sex in the City type obsession with the material, whether it be shoes, clothes or designer men, but I love beautiful things, colorful language and shiny ideas and want to gather them around me.

I got my chance to cast my beady eyes around a glut of shiny this weekend at a rock and gem fair near Kingston, where I spent far too much on things that didn’t take up all that much room in my purse.

Part of my motivation for going was obviously to pick up some much needed supplies. Ordering stones on-line, while convenient, is a little bit of a crap shoot; you can never be sure of what fire or lustre that you’ll end up with. Being able to pick up a stone or strand of beads and watch what happens when the light hits it is a real luxury.

The other incentive to make the trek was to meet the lovely 3’s of Etsy fame who’s equally beady of eye when it comes to stones and beads.

After meeting up with 3’s , The Rock Star (who is actually a living saint in the getting-dragged-around-to-boring-shit department) generously became Prawn Bitch for the afternoon and toddled off after our daughter and tried to make sure she didn’t either steal or destroy anything, leaving 3’s and I free to peruse the staggering mountain of shiny glinting seductively, “come-and-buy” at all and sundry.

The people watching at an event such as this is always a good time. A gem show can draw professionals, enthusiastic amateurs and those that fit into the category of “other”. (I realized, while standing at a booth, that the woman next to me was holding a crystal in each hand while chanting and swaying. People watching is always slightly more interesting when minor celebrity enters the mix, so we were kind of surprised when a voice from behind us informed us that we “couldn’t get out” of the door that we were determinedly pushing on that we were face to face with none other than Rolf Harris.

US readers most likely would not know the inimitable Mr. Harris from a hole in the ground, but he’s a minor legend here in the UK for just being one of those guys who’s just always been a nice guy on TV for as long as anyone can remember. He was reclining on a couch, apparently taking a break from the show floor. He told 3’s that she looked “dramatic”. (3’s is a very tall, lovely girl with bright orange hair, so he wasn’t too far off in his assessment.)

Peppering this post are pictures of the shiny that I brought home with me. I’m looking very much forward to playing with all of the beautiful cabs and beads that have taken their place in my collection!

Mooching Towards Greatness

My most used design process of late is sitting down with a sheet of silver and my computer, seeing what shapes I can come up with, making a pattern, cutting it out, putting it on the metal, cutting THAT out and away we go. I've been trying new things recently; moving away from slightly more fiddly pieces with lots of joins and stones and into larger, bold shapes. The views of these pieces have been letting me know that I'm headed in the right direction.

I do tend to plan things out ahead of time if they happen to be fiddly, however. This mock up is a plan for an undertaking that may be some time in completion. It's called "Twelve Dancing Princesses" and is based on an illustration by the incomparable Kinuko Craft. I have a slight advantage in the process due to the fact that I have actually already made it once, before I knew what I was doing, especially in relation to soldering. Recently, due to my former ineptitude, I was able to pry almost all of the stones from the former piece and sadly consign rather a lot of silver to my growing pile of scrap that I am at a loss to know what to do with. When I receive my newest batch of silver sheet, I'll start on the second incarnation of this piece.

My husband and I have odd conversations sometimes. The other day he remarked,

"Have you ever wondered if you do really everyday things the same way as everyone else? Like going to the bathroom? Since you can't ASK anyone if you're doing it right, do you ever wonder if everyone else, like, stands on their head or something?"

That he asks questions like this is largely the reason why I married him in the first place.

I feel that way about silversmithing. For fear of someone looking at me like I crawled out from under a pile of silver shavings, I've never really ASKED anyone how to do things, I've just always done what works for me. Are there easier or better ways to do what I do? Probably. But having built my skill by trial and error, I've always been a little hesitant to ask others in my profession about their creative process lest I find that I'm a complete disaster.

I suppose the process isn't as important as the end result.