Saturday, 23 October 2010

Oh Dear...

I have been accidentally buying expensive things again. Having finally just about saved enough money to purchase the shiny new camera I've been coveting for the past year, Canon have only gone and brought out a new model. Drat. Which, of course, I decided that I must have.

I maintain that I cannot be held entirely to blame for this slightly rash and impulsive purchase. The Jessops website tricked me by claiming I could pay for it on 6 month interest free credit. "Hurrah!" I thought, until it asked me if I would like to collect the camera in store, I told it that, yes, that would be lovely thanks, then it concluded my order and smugly informed me that the balance would be payable in full on collection of the camera. Bum! I guess the interest free credit option and the collect in store option were not compatible.

Consequently, I now own a rather expensive but quite lovely Canon SX30.

Sunday, 10 October 2010

Fancy Box Design

I think I may have finally made a decision on my endless packaging dilemma. I have been reading about how, as a jeweller, how you present yourself and your brand is super-important, which is something I've been giving more thought to as I've been messing about with my website. I've been looking at some quite nice pink and black boxes, but when it came down to investing in logo printing on them, I just couldn't quite commit, as I wasn't 100% happy with them.

After much dithering, I decided I was going to get some custom made leather boxes, but after pricing it all up, it was just way too expensive and I couldn't quite justify the cost.

Some more dithering has finally brought me to the idea of having the design I use for the background of my banner and website foil printed in high gloss black onto a matte black box, with a little gold keyhole printed on the front of the box.

I have faffed about with photoshop and come up with this not terribly professional mockup of how I want them to look:

And yes, I am aware that graphic design is not one of my strengths, thank you...

But hopefully this will give the nice box people a visual idea of what I'm after, as I'm rubbish at explaining stuff without pictures. Hopefully they can do it...

Monday, 4 October 2010

UK Jewellers Collective

I have recently joined this rather amazing forum, which can be found here. It is full of very, very helpful and lovely people and much advice on all things jewellery making related.

One of the members of the forum recently organised a charm swap, which I signed up for. It was much fun, and involved receiving the name and address of another forum member, for whom you would make and send a charm. The recipient of your charm would not know who made it, and in return you would receive an anonymous charm from a different member. I decided to do a little birthstone flower and asked the organiser for my person's birth month.

And here it is - Emerald birthstone charm for May:

And with some playing around in Lightroom to make the stones change colour:


The charm I received was rather fab, with an amazing leaf texture on the outside and gorgeous vintage style photograph inside. Very me :)

Here it is:

Watching all the photographs of the charms appear as people received them, and trying to guess who had made each one kept me glued to the forum for days, and at the end all the pictures were put in a gallery and it was eventually worked out who made what.

Fab idea, no?

Sunday, 3 October 2010

New Commission

Hiya,

So, it appears I have been awol from my blog for the past couple of weeks, partly due to exciting shiny thing making, but also partly due to a much less exciting stressful time at work trying to clear my desk before my week off next week. Yep, I get a WHOLE WEEK OFF! Actually, it will be the first time this year that I get a week off, as I've mainly just booked the odd couple of days here and there up until now. I think I'm due some downtime - the boy stated that I am currently lacking in both patience and a sense of humour, both of which he deems necessary in order to put up with him! Bless.

Right, less of the boring work stress, more of the exciting shiny things!

I've been asked by some friends to make another pair of creative wedding rings, a sneak preview of which I gave you in my last post. We based the design on a tattoo one of the couple has - here are my original sketches (stop giggling at the back there, I am fully aware that drawing is not really my thing)

And this is how they turned out:

The back of the winged heart ring has a tiny skull, and the back of the winged skull ring has a tiny heart. So the rings aren't identical, but complimentary, see?

This was yet another design, where I went "Oh, that won't be too difficult..." Pause "...oh, wait". But, it actually turned out to be really fun to make, rather than the nightmare I had predicted, due to my amazing new saw, but I'll save that for a whole tool geekery post all of its own.

In other shiny things news, an exciting new roller derby project will be coming your way shortly, plus some more shiny weather. Watch this space...