lots of exciting new photos

I have new photos - all done by the brilliant Stone Photos (www.stonephotos.co.uk) and many of them are now up on Not on the High Street. Also new on Not on the High Street is my latest mini pendant - a sweet little hollow pendant with an embedded 18ct yellow gold ball on the front with contrasting finishes on side and front. You can see it here. I'm really happy with the photos, showing the jewellery as I hope it always ends up - worn by someone! Here are some of my favourites:

New work on website and some in galleries

New work! Several new brooches are on my website and on Not on the High Street. A new hollow mini pendant (11mm diameter) is available at Jam Eton and New Ashgate galleries. That mini pendant will soon be on Not on the High Street as well.

Here are some photos: click on each one for more information.

mini photo frame

I was talking to my mom the other day and she showed me the contact sheet from a set of photos that she had printed. The photos were very small on the contact sheet, 14 x 20mm. (They were all of my nephew, apparently my parents literally cannot have enough photos of him!) Anyway, it happens that my mom is also restoring an old dollhouse. So I suggested that the tiny photos needed a tiny silver photo frame to be placed in the dollhouse. So, here's the result....a photo frame that fits photos that are 14 x 20mm.

It was made in 4 parts. First the very thin wire U-shape to create the slot for the photo to go in. Then the back of the frame with a little notch in case the photo is hard to get out (the U-shape was soldered on to the back). Then the front of the frame - a bevelled inside and outside edge rectangular frame. Then I soldered the back on to the front. Then the stand - made so the frame can stand horizontally and vertically.

So here it is: total size 18 x 23mm. (One with my 3cm panda as model.)

New stockist!!!

I am delighted to announce that I have a new stockist, the fabulous Adore Contemporary Boutique (www.adorecontemporaryboutique.com) in Falmouth. The gallery is run by Jessica Hewitt, who makes her own lovely, colourful jewellery. You can see her work on her website: www.jessicahewitt.com as well as at Jam Eton. I have sent a collection of 25 pieces to Adore, including this rather new brooch. It is all sterling silver with eight silver balls and a double steel pin.

October - start as I mean to go on

I have been busy making, making, making and more making. I have exciting new work which will be unveiled soon and also very excited to have a new stockist. Details of all that will be revealed soon when my work is actually at this gallery!

This is proof of working hard - the skin was peeling off the top of my fingers!

I have taken to sending Dougall photos of my progress during the day, just to keep me going and I got some nice series of photos out of it. Here's a series showing the progression of my t-bar clasp necklaces and bracelets (which are now back in stock at Jam Eton and will be on their website soon!):

Roses are red.......or silver

I've been making roses for a woman who wanted to have a piece of jewellery to commemorate her late grandfather who was a keen gardener. First I made a ring, and then she also asked for matching earrings. It's a very different style to what I usually make - an interesting challenge to make them look like real roses. All of the roses are about 1cm diameter. So here's the ring:

and here are the matching stud earrings:

Gold ring

I had a heavy gold link from a bracelet or necklace that had been taken out because the bracelet/necklace was too long. I wanted to use the link to make a gold ring, trying to cut out as little gold as possible. So I hammered and hammered and filed and finally made it into the shape I wanted. The only blip was that due to the original shape of the link, there was a little gap/hole in the shank of the new ring that I had to fill, which I did using the bits I had cut out during the process. So, except for the solder, the ring is made entirely from that one original link. I made photos along the way to show the progression. You can see more photos of the progression on the Facebook page for Studio E174, which is where I did most of the work: https://www.facebook.com/studioe174 

Here are a few of the photos: 

Jewellery evening classes at Studio E174

Studio E174 are now taking bookings for autumn evening classes - filling up fast! Based in High Wycombe.

Silversmithing Classes start on Monday 15th September, Jewellery Classes start on Tuesday 23rd September. Classes are 2 1/2 hours and cost £230 for 10 sessions.
 
To see previous student work, further information and a booking form please visit http://www.studio-e174.co.uk/index.php?page=evening-classes

Follow what's happening at the Studio on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/studioe174

News

Today my grandmother is 95 - happy birthday Oma!!!! Thought I'd start with that rather impressive birthday news!

Yesterday I made a visit to the lovely New Ashgate gallery in Farnham to drop off a couple of pieces of jewellery for my display there. If you haven't already seen it, their website has been spruced up and looks rather spiffy these days: http://www.newashgate.org.uk/shop_artists/7702/c/101/machi-waard/jewellery
Of course I also have work at Jam in Eton, whose new website is also pretty spiffy and you should have a look at the wide range of lovely jewellery (and more) on show: www.jam-eton.co.uk 

The big news for me is that I've joined Studio E174. The studio is a proper jewellery and silversmithing studio in the sense that it's filled with tools and benches and the buzz of people making exciting things. It's in a lovely old industrial building with lots of other studios in it, ranging from PMC upstairs to model cars and railways and many other things besides. Studio E174 (named after the E number that silver is as a food addidtive) was founded by Lucian Taylor and Elizabeth Callinicos. Lucian is an accomplished silversmith (amongst many other things, Goldsmith Hall commissioned work from him!) and Elizabeth is a well-established jeweller and installation artist who shows work all over Europe.

I will be attempting to post items on the E174 Facebook page, which you can like here: https://www.facebook.com/studioe174

So far it's been a great environment for me to get lots of making done. I've been busy! I'm getting closer to being able to work on new designs, which is a great feeling. Here are some photos of activities in the studio:

This is the main bench in the center of the studio, here with Polly Collins (she was learning tig welding with Lucian, the result of an award she won for her silversmithing work). 

This is a small torch (oxygen and propane I think it was) - a type of torch I hadn't used before, so something new to try! The regular torch had been kidnapped to go to Art in Action with the silversmiths (I think it was the Contemporary British Silversmiths). Art in Action is on this weekend!

 I've been asked to make a ring and a bracelet with some roses - so I practiced making roses with sterling silver, here are some results: left is a close up after polishing, right on my hand before polishing.

And a photo of the benchpeg with a whole load of circles ready to be turned into earrings. 

How can it be May already!?

Somehow May snuck up on me. Not only that, but it seems that it's nearly the end of May. How time speeds up so much when I'm not looking is baffling. Last week I sent a top up of work to the New Ashgate Gallery. You can see the selection on their website here: http://www.newashgate.org.uk/shop_artists/7702/c/101/machi-waard/jewellery
And here are photos of some of the pieces which are now with the New Ashgate Gallery:

Custom bracelet and ring

A customer bought this set of earrings and necklace - what I call my 'all circle' set - circles set in circles, made sense to me! Anyway, she was very pleased with the set and wanted a matching ring and bracelet.

The bracelet was made along the same lines as my single gold ball open circle bracelet, so it looks like this:

But the ring was a trickier matter. The little silver balls are hollow, so cannot withstand the kind of pressure that rings take. Although it would be ok for a while, at some point one of the silver balls would dent. So I needed solid silver balls, so I handmade them. (You can buy solid cast balls, but they have a rough finish that is annoying to clean and have a pronounced flat bit from the sprue.) There are two issues to that - firstly the silver balls need to be as close in size as possible to each other and secondly, they need to be as round as possible. The size thing involved choosing a piece of silver wire - no using lots of bits of different sized silver, or it is too hard to calculate. Then I had to make a phone call to Dougall about if I start with a 3mm wide piece of round wire, how much of that do I need to end up with a 3mm diameter sphere? I heard some mumbling over the phone about pi and radius and some other things and then the answer was roughly just over 2.1mm. So I cut the pieces to be as close to that as possible with a tube-cutter tool.

I melted each piece in a block of charcoal - with a round dent cut into the charcoal to get the spheres as close to round as possible. Of course the weight of the metal means that they are actually a bit bottom-heavy, so not totally round, but as this was for a ring, only the top half is important. Also the top of the sphere turns out pretty clean, with only minimal tidying required, whereas the bottom is rather textured, but again, for a ring this would go on the bottom so it wouldn't matter. Anyway, long story short - success with only 0.1mm variation in size between the silver balls. Result, a strong, solid ring:

ring repair

Several years ago, I made a wedding ring which is 5 rings put together - 3 yellow gold with 2 white gold in between. If you have read this blog before, you may recognise this because the husband lost his ring and I remade it for him at the end of last year. Now his wife had an unfortunate incident a couple of weeks ago - a train door was slammed on her hand! Luckily the ring took the brunt of the force and thankfully her finger, although bruised, was not broken. However, the ring didn't get off lightly! Here are some photos of the damaged ring, with the joints of two of the yellow gold rings cracked from the force of being bent as well as the join between the various rings also taking a beating and cracking (especially one of the top yellow rings).

The ring as a whole had gotten an oval shape, but the thing with this ring is that the yellow rings are higher than the white ones. If you use a mallet on a mandrel in the usual way to reshape the ring, the force only applies to the yellow rings directly, thus risking more solder joins cracking between the rings. Luckily I have polymorph, so made a small tool with the indentation of the ring profile so I could use the mallet on that so the force would be more distributed over all the rings. These seemed to work, as I didn't create any more cracked joins! Using a combination of annealing, gently forcing the ring up the mandrel and the polymorph tool, I got it back into shape. As anyone who has tried will know, solder will not fill a gap. So with the most damaged join (of the middle yellow ring, see top photo), I also made a teensy piece of yellow gold sheet out of a bit of scrap gold and soldered it over the join, the only way to trick solder into filling up a gap. (Well, besides laser welding, but I don't have a laser welder!) So in the end the ring was coaxed back into shape with no cracks on the outside. There is one small crack on the inside still, but it's not structural so I guess it's a souvenir to remind one not to get a train door slammed on one's finger! Anyway, here's the repaired ring with the side that was most damaged front and center:

Fashion Party at Jam Eton and Ieva Poriete

Click on picture to zoom

"20 of the Best" exhibition

I am super excited to have organised and be taking part in Jam Eton's "20 of the Best" exhibition. This year is Jam Eton's 20th anniversary of exhibiting and supporting great fine craft. Mike and Jacqueline have worked very hard at always finding the best jewellery, ceramics, glasswork and more from across the UK and sometimes from further afield. It's a huge achievement to have been in business for so long - and still going strong!

For March, I have organised a special 20th anniversary jewellery exhibition which will be shown in the window at Jam. We asked 20 of our favourite jewellers to create a special piece of jewellery for us to exhibit for the month. These pieces have been arriving over the last couple of weeks and they are stunning - it is truly exciting to see what each jeweller has come up with! Since it is a very special exhibition, I also organised a photo shoot at Stone Photos studio with a model to show off the jewellery creations. We were kindly lent some amazing dresses by Eton's newest fashion designer, Ieva Poriete. I will put some of those photos here, but you will be able to see them on Jam's Facebook page throughout the month: www.facebook.com/JamEtonGallery as well as on their website: www.jam-eton.co.uk

Of course I was excited to come up with a special piece myself for the exhibition! My piece is a concave spiral sterling silver bangle with four 18ct gold balls placed inside the curve around the bangle. It is made from a single strip of sterling silver sheet and has a muted saturnised finish. Here are some photos of the piece itself and on our lovely model.

The ring with the bird is by Hannah Louise Lamb.

Updates!

I've just updated my Not on the High Street and Etsy shops. I've added a brooch, a pin and a necklace to NOTHS and you can see them here: http://www.notonthehighstreet.com/partners/machidewaardjewellery/products and includes this necklace:

And over on Etsy, I have added 7 pairs of small silver earrings and 1 pair of cufflinks. Those are the last pair of that style of cufflinks. The earrings haven't seen the light of day for a while - they are small so quite good for higher ear piercings as well as regular. Perfect for work! Also included is a pair of mini white pearl dangle earrings - the last pair. I've never come across these mini pearls again - although to be fair I didn't look that hard! I like their tiny-ness.