Liberty Open Call 2011

So, that exciting but terrifying project I mentioned? I have, in a fit of madness, signed up for Liberty's Best of British open call this year. Liberty has always been one of my favourite places in London, as it's full of beautiful and interesting things and the building itself is incredible. See?

They say:

"Now in its 3rd year the Open Call is continuing to recognise and support new and emerging British design talent and we are again calling for all prospective designers and creative talents to come forward with their ideas. A panel of experts comprising of Liberty’s Managing Director, Ed Burstell, his esteemed buying team and industry experts including top names from press and fashion retail will pick the best designs to be sold in store. Ed Burstell and his team will offer support and direction needed to get your items selling on Liberty’s world renowned shelves."

Having heard from people who have done it in previous years, it sounds a lot like the X-Factor. You register your details, queue for some hours, then you get 3 minutes to pitch your product to Liberty's buying team.

In theory, this doesn't sound too difficult, right? However, those 3 little minutes encompass everthing that I am both terrified by and rubbish at! Self promotion is definitely not my strong point, and I rather belong to the Bridget Jones school of public speaking. This could all go terribly, terribly wrong...

On the other hand, it's good to face your fears, no? I don't think for a second that I will get through the first round, but I think the experience will be very useful. Apparently the buying team give helpful and very constructive feedback, even if they don't think your products are for them. Also, how amazing would it be to launch my new business being able to say that Liberty were a stockist!

It's on 2 April, so I have a couple of months to design some new things and get myself ready. Eek!

Wish me luck...

Experiments with Dough

So, one of my many random New Year’s resolutions was to blog more. Sadly for you, dear readers, this means that there may be much non-shiny related wittering.

Firstly, I am learning to cook things that aren’t cake. Whilst I remain convinced that a person can cover all necessary food groups with experimental cake recipes, I have yet to convince anyone else.

I’ve always steered clear of making pastry, as it seems fraught with go-wrongable things, but the stuff that comes ready made is always full of strange ingredients. And lard. Bleurgh.

So, I found a recipe for a tart. It had squash in, which is one of my favourite things, especially since acquiring the king of peelers from Lakeland, which happily removes evil squash skin in a second (and means that the boy no longer has to hide behind a cushion in terror as I hack randomly at the poor vegetable with a large knife). Apparently, all ingredients were to be chucked in a food processor and mixed, which sounded super-easy. I always thought pastry took forever and involved rubbing butter and flour together, or some such alchemy, but apparently this is no longer the case.

So, I made pastry, hurrah! And I learned what “blind baking” means (sticking pastry case in oven to pre-cook covered in baking paper and dried beans, for those who want to know).

Behold my tart!

Doesn’t it look lovely? And it came out of the tin and everything! It was even edible and I didn’t poison anyone. I call that a result.

Also, lovely boss gave us the very generous gift of a breadmaker for Christmas. Have wanted one of these for ages, as making bread always looked terribly tricky.

The instructions called for just chucking everything in the machine and ignoring for 4 hours. Whilst this is absolutely my kind of cooking, I didn’t for a second expect it to work. The machine is so very quiet, I didn’t think it could possibly be growing a loaf of bread in there.

But look! We opened the lid to a perfect (and delicious) loaf of bread, hurrah!

Am baking genius.

Well Hello There 2011

It appears that the time to publish my little review of the year has rolled round again.

So, 2010 then. In some ways, it did rather fly by, but at the same time it seems like forever ago that I moved into my lovely new flat. So, what was last year all about? Hmmm. If 2009 was a year of firsts, I think 2010 was a year of learning. I begin 2011 with rather less bounce and excitement than I did 2010, due to being completely exhausted! I gave pretty much everything I had to my jewellery hobby over the past year, hoping to turn it into a business, with not even a little holiday to chill out a bit.

My, but that was a bit of a moody way to begin this post wasn’t it? I have an annoying habit of getting brought down by all the things I didn’t achieve and kind of forget a bit about the things that I did.

The first exciting thing was that I actually made quite a lot of things for friends this December, hurrah! People were after little crash helmets as Christmas pressies for their derby girlfriends, wives and daughters, including one friend who has to be the coolest dad ever! I ended up getting my little silver derby skate charm finished rather late in the year, but can't wait to sort out a website and start selling, as I invested a lot of time and money into making them.

For next year, the thing I learned from December is that I need to be stricter with cut off deadlines for making this for people for Christmas. There we go, first resolution. Yay!

Another exciting thing was starting to build my website. Which is not yet finished. But I really really meant to finish it by the end of 2010, the making of shiny things just got in the way. I learned that even using an idiot proof web design program is pretty time consuming. Especially with the obsessive way in which I approach things... But yes, it will soon be finished. Honest, it will...

What else did I do? Oh, I made some new business cards for when I'm finally ready to launch, which look like so:


Now I just need to learn to (a) take them places with me, and (b) actually give them to people, rather than just mumbling and running away when people say they like the jewellery I am wearing.

I found a fantastic forum at www.larsandingrid.co.uk, full of lovely people willing to share their jewellery making wisdom and knowledge.

I’ve still managed to find time for some messy and inexpert experiments involving Fimo and wallpaper paste (separately obvs). I am hoping 2011 will also involve some sort of random crafty experimentation.

Some cupcakes were also made, my favourites being my little summer bees:

In other jewellery related stuff, I had some custom boxes made, which finally arrived (very late) near the end of December. Here they are:

Fancy, huh?

I think the boxes were a good investment. Other things I invested in this year were some proper studio lighting (definitely worth it) and a new camera. Although I do kind of wish I’d gone for an SLR...

I also made a couple of sets of custom wedding rings involving skulls, hearts and moustaches, which were great fun to do:


So, all in all I had a very productive, but also very hectic year. 2011 will be more about balance. I will still need to work hard so I can finally launch my business, but shall also take breaks, go on holiday and finally give the long-suffering boy some attention!

Onwards and upwards then. I have a super-exciting (and more than a bit terrifying) project to approach, more of which I shall share later, as I fear I have wittered enough for one day. Farewell for now...

A Belated Merry Christmas

Well, that was a bit mental! I ended up frantically making things right up until just before Christmas - eek! Added to which, my job was also frantically busy and my body did it's usual end of year shutdown, presenting me with an evil cold just when I didn't have time to get sick. Boooooo.

Had a lovely Christmas with the boy's lovely family in the snowy South West. I was still pretty ill, so everything was a little bit of a daze, but it was nice to have some enforced rest.

Having just started to feel less ill, remembered we had agreed to hold NYE party. Bum. We are, however, dividing the party with our friends who live round the corner, which will be fun. They are hosting drinks and nibbles, then it's over to ours for giant buffet. How terribly grown up.

Spent most of yesterday prepping and cooking, so hopefully it will be okay. First ever attempt at proper pastry making about to go in the oven, so fingers crossed...

Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, have a lovely New Year.

X

A Small Shiny Roller Skate

I have finally finished my silver roller derby skate charm, hurrah!

This was a project I started way back in 2009, as I wanted to do a skate charm that looked like my Riedell 265 skates.

You may recall that my initial attempts at sculpting the boot in silver clay were somewhat disastrous and looked like this:

Which is rubbish, obviously.

Attempting to sculpt the trucks and axles was even worse, as silver clay is far too brittle to do anything delicate with.

So, I decided to ignore it for a while instead. Obviously, this wasn’t helpful to the overall getting it finished plan.

Finally, defeat was admitted and a modelmaker specialising in sculpting tiny things was called in.

And so over to the very talented (and also terribly patient) James Freckingham of Robotic Industries, who deciphered my scribbly pictures and paragraphs of wittering about wings and delivered me an adorable little replica of my skate. Hurrah! Here it is.

I decided to shorten the wings a little, so it looked like this:

Then off to the caster! Who may have wanted to kill me... Apparently it was terribly difficult to cast, many moulds were made, but finally my little silver castings arrived. Tada!

And, after cleanup, soldering, polishing and attaching wheels, my little silver skate finally looked like so:

Which was exactly what I wanted, yay! A small silver roller derby skate charm, which looked just like my 265s. Except my skates sadly don’t have wings...

A few different angles:

It turned out much heavier than I had thought – the charm weighs around 15 grams, which is a big old chunk of silver!

I also did a couple of special ones with sparkly gemstone attachments to represent league and team colours.

I think they look rather nice...

OMG December!

Another year, another December sneaking quietly up behind me and shouting "Boo! Here I am!" at the top of its little tinsel-festooned voice.

So, I haven't posted in a while, as I've been ridiculously busy the past month. Trying to get the website finished, ordering business cards, repeatedly chasing up my fancy boxes, which slightly alarmingly still haven't arrived. The UK rep for Dahlinger Boxes with whom I have been dealing initially told me that I would have my boxes within three weeks of ordering - that three week deadline being up today - but seen nowt of them yet, and with my emails going ignored and promises of telephone calls being returned coming to nothing, I have a feeling that they are not going to turn up.

Also, my little silver roller skate charm has caused many headaches for the caster and much expense for me, but the silver castings should be turning up by the end of the year. Exciting! But sadly I will have to charge a lot more than I wanted to for them, due to the insanely expensive casting costs. Booooo. It's also going to take me a while to get them ready to sell, as a lot of work needs to be done on the castings when they come back.

I've also been hard at work on some new shiny weather jewellery to add to my collection and, as I really hate to do a post without any pictures, here they are.

A super-cute little cloud pendant with blue topaz raindrop:

Some rather nice dangly ear wires, as I've made a pair of earrings in this style for each collection I've designed since some time in the year 2000:

And, as the boy pointed out that very few of my collections contain rings (I rarely wear them as they annoy me greatly when I'm cycling), I've actually gone and made some that I really like! A charm ring with an adorable little silver cloud dangling from it and a rather nice band ring with a cloud and a lovely deep blue topaz pear shaped gemstone. Tada!

As I really liked the way they turned out, I think I may make rings more often.

And now I must return to the workshop, where it is currently so cold I can see my breath poof out in little clouds. At least I can tell I'm still alive...

A Halloween Weekend

I do love Halloween. How could you not? There are ghosts and pumpkins and bats and dressing up and much silliness.

This year, we had a bit of a dinner party on Saturday – it wasn’t an actual Halloween party, but obviously this didn’t stop me from adding pumpkin lights and spooky candles and dancing about in a sparkly spider necklace and glittery bat tights. Apparently one of my dinner guests described me as a cross between Kylie Minogue and Marilyn Manson!

Anyway, here are my pumpkin lights:

I actually want to keep them up all winter. Could I get away with putting them on my Christmas tree I wonder, in a Nightmare Before Christmas inspired fashion? Maybe I’ll sneak them on and the boy won’t notice...

My ludicrous bat candles:

My fabulous sparkly spider necklace:

There would also have been some Halloween inspired cupcakes, but sadly my mixer suffered a rather dramatic death half way through dessert making. I had made some rather distressed looking sugarpaste ghosts that were going to hover on spooky graveyard cupcakes, but sadly it was not to be.

See...

All in all, it was rather fun. We made Spanish food, drank wine and played on the Guitar Hero game that had been delivered that morning. I discovered I am very bad on drums, but much, much worse on vocals!

So that was Saturday and then on Sunday night we went to see ALICE COOPER!!!!!! Amazers! He was doing a 2 night Halloween show at the Roundhouse, which is such a small and lovely venue. It was brilliant fun.

Usually my weekends are spent quietly ensconced at my work bench or watching Come Dine With Me, so it was all a bit hectic and I am sleepy today.

Much work needs to be done this week though. I have two orders for silver crash helmets from the US, plus a further enquiry this morning, so I need to get making things. Exciting!