Notes from behind the blowtorch

A natural progression

Sarah — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 15:53:18 +0000

Pretty soon I’m going to be withdrawing the copper items from my website. The stock I have left will be on offer at any stalls I take until it’s gone, but I won’t be doing any more in copper after that. I’m also winding down the amount of things I offer in plated metals. The main reason for this is simply lack of demand. My customer’s prefer real silver and to be perfectly honest, so do I.

I am however, currently working on introducing a new material – wood.

Some months ago I saw the work of a company who make beautifully carved wooden jewellery (at a price!) and was inspired. As those who know my work will be aware, much of my designs are drawn from trees, plants and leaves. It seemed somewhat fitting then, to start working with wood and see what happened.

My first experiments were with some offcuts from my own infant cherry tree, put aside some years before with a mind to ‘do something’ with them.

With the aid of my multi-tool, a few gemstones and a blissful ignorance of what I was doing, the results were as below -

I liked them, but they were very small, due to the small size of the branches I’d made them from and very delicate. Too delicate really to sell with any conscience and very difficult to make more than one of each because the branches are unique so I put them aside and went off for a little think for a few weeks.

I’ve since been on my holidays to Cornwall, where I visited the Lost (well, found now) Gardens of Heligan. A beautiful place, very inspiring with lovely woods and massive rhododendrons and palm trees. They also have their own wood shop, and sell kiln-dried lengths of Heligan wood for you to carve or turn or whatever. I bought a block of oak and a length of spalted ash to see if the muses would be taken with them.

I’ve come up with a few designs using the ash, easier to replicate than the first ones and without any gemstones so far. The wood is gorgeous, with a nice grain running through it giving the designs a stripey effect as you can see -

I’ve been quite pleased with how they’ve turned out, it’s been a fun adventure working out how to make them and figuring my way around a new medium and I hope to bring them to the website fairly soon if they recieve a positive response – so please do leave any comments or suggestions that occur to you. No one needs an WordPress account to comment here.

As for further designs I have mind, I think I may invesigate the possibilities of making a version of my silver leaf pendants in wood too and may also work on a pent. I also have half a mind playing with the idea of carving a reservoir into a shaped wooden pendant and encasing a dried flower in resin within that reservior, but it’s been a long time since I worked with resin. Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions/inspiration!

Website jiggery-pokery

Sarah — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:12:05 +0000

I’ve been teaching myself a bit of Photoshop lately. This has enabled me to redesign the site’s banner so it now looks like this -

I am ridiculously proud of it, not least because I figured out animating without going through the ‘throw the laptop out of the window’ stage.

I’ve also finally, a good 5 years after I first set up the website, designed a site image that I’m actually happy with. The one that goes up the top corner, it’s been rubbish for years but I’m much happier with it now.

I’ve also added this blog of course, it’s got it’s own page on the site which links directly here, as hopefully some of you have discovered!

I tend to mess around with the site design from time to time, unfortunately the things I’d like to change most are in the shopping cart set up which is standardised and I can’t mess with it. Web design proper is beyond me I’m afraid, so please forgive me the limitations there.

And so we begin…

Sarah — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:44:03 +0000

Here we go then, my occaisonal blog all about my jewellery and the website I sell it on.

First off I should say, I am Brisinga Jewellery. I design it, I make it, I sell it. I designed the website (via a wizard, I’m not a techy genius sadly), I designed and made the graphics on it. I took all the photographs on the website too. I could be described as a control freak, but all these things keep the costs down, keeping the costs down means I don’t pass them on to you.

It also means that everything you see here, you only see here. Whatever you buy, you can rest assured that no one else in the world has anything quite the same, because little variations will always occur where a human hand is doing the crafting.

I do not buy ready made ‘blanks’ – fully formed jewellery pieces only waiting for a gemstone to be glued in place – before imposing a giant mark up and calling it ‘handmade’.

I do not buy in machine pressed pendants from Indonesia or India or China and pretend that they are powerful magical amulets.

Rant over, after this I’ll mainly be rambling