Last weekend's adventures

With textile jewellery:

at Walford Mill Crafts in Wimbourne

with Melissa Warren a textile artist and designer based in Wales.

Tokyo Blues necklace

Finally got my glue and findings out to finish this little number.

Time goes by

Recently, whilst purchasing a birthday present I treated myself to some tasty beads and other bits to make this watch. It has been worn quite a lot recently and has seen double duty as a timepiece and worry beads.

Yep, I broke it whilst fiddling with it absent mindedly whilst updating a chart  mid-afternoon at work.  Funnily enough my colleagues knew exactly what had happened without looking round.  My apologies for being a bit rattly for the past week - I will return to the ever reliable Baby-G next week. Though I'm off to the local craft emporium to get more thing stretchy beading elastic this weekend.

Birthday Brooches & Keepers

A few presents for a recent birthday. First a brooch made with some lovely Aizome Chiyogami Washi*

Something to keep the above in and along with the recipients collection of brooches, a brooch keeper.

It is a variation on this brooch keeper from Buttontree Lane (or it could always be used as an extra large needle case!).

*
Aizome - Indigo dye
Chiyogami - "Chiyo" thousand generation, "gami" paper
Washi - "Wa" Japanese, "shi" paper

A little get together

A little more origami jewellery has been made but this time I wasn't solo. G & X were my willing victims pupils and came along last week and created their own origami brooches (left & right above, the ones in the centre were my sample pieces).

More bag charms

More bag charms

I have dug further into my bead stash (I have one of those too) and created a few more bag charms whilst watching The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency. The little yellow one is a series of wrapped loops on head pins and wire as mI had run out of chain and some of the yellow beads holes were too narrow to take a head pin.

Jewellery Workshop 2

Spent another pleasant evening at a jewellery workshop at my company social club (its better than it sounds). Where I rustled up the following yummy bracelet:

This was finished after the lesson as I was mainly occupied during the lesson with this bag charm:

I can now (almost) do wire wrapped loops with my eyes closed - not quite like a pro (consistency needed)but both projects were certainly good for practise!

Birthday bits

A month ago I attended a jewellery making workshop with my friend G where we learnt how to make floating bead necklaces. It was led by the people from World of Beads, a local bead shop in Winchester.
It is my friend C's birthday, a significant one, but we're not shouting about it too much (the clue is in the number of flowers on the card). I decided to make C this necklace and a pair of matching earrings using some of the gorgeous and more expensive (but worth it) Murano glass beads that World of Beads stock in their Parchment Street shop. As this is my third version of this necklace the finish is much improved from my first attempt in the workshop. (I forgot to photograph the turquoise one which I made for my sister H's birthday).
If you have never had much luck with the fiddly loops required of earrings and other jewellery making techniques the videos found here are really useful - very clear production so you can see exactly what is being done, or, if you are in the area I would recommend the workshops at World of Beads.

By luck I had a matching little pochette that I made some time ago from "Omiyage" by Kumiko Sudo to put the birthday jewellery in.
I then used some of my watercolour cartridge paper to make a little box and flower:
A matching card was also produced from my card and paper stash:
Happy Birthday C! By now we should be celebrating with you in a nearby tavern.