This ring was the second last piece I made for my Vocational Course. The design was one provided by the school, as the task was to learn claw/basket setting. I chose the stone though!!
I made the ring particularly for my mum, for her birthday. She’s delighted with it!! Hooray!!
My dear friend Sophie chose this piece of drusy agate and I made it into a pendant for her.
It’s the first pendant I’ve made with drusy, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out!
Soph was really pleased with it, and I plan to create some more soon!! 🙂
I asked my dear friend Morgan to choose a drusy agate cabochon from my collection, and I made it into a ring for her.
She wanted it to look a bit old-fashioned, so we designed it with a half-round shank, and I gave the silver a very matt finish.
She is thrilled with it, so I am very happy!!
I finally finished making a pendant from the last piece of cuttlefish casting I had from our casting workshop earlier this year.
It’s a bit of a departure from my usual style, but the casting just seemed to need some softness with it!
My teacher gave me a couple of suggestions for how to finish it off – thanks Sue! I love the nature of silversmithing, there’s always some new way to look at things and something new to be learned!!
I’m keeping this piece for myself!
Maria, whom I previously created a gorgeous ocean wave jasper ring for, wanted a drusy agate ring too.
I was happy to show her the stones I have available! She chose this divine orange one.
Thanks Maria! I confess I love this piece of drusy so much, I bought a similar stone in the same colour to make a ring just for me!
One of my fellow students, Jane, asked me if I could make her a drusy agate ring.
I feel very honoured that she would want to buy a piece from me!
I was very happy with the way it turned out, and Jane was very pleased too. Thank you, dear Jane!
I came across the most divine pieces pictured in ‘Jewelry Concepts and Technology’ by Oppi Untracht, a fantastic book that I bought recently. I was inspired to research John Paul Miller, the artist who created them.
Miller was born in 1918, and started his career as a painter. Inspired by the creations of a fellow student, he started making silver jewellery of his own. After receiving advice from the director of his school that “we don’t need any more good watercolor painters. Why don’t you concentrate on jewelry?” he turned his full attention to the craft.
Miller rediscovered the lost Roman art of granulation. He immersed himself in enamelling. I love his work, it is so intricate and organic. I can only dream of aspiring to be one hundredth as good as this!!
From the interviews I have read, he seems, at 94, to be a humble and gentle man, who has lived an interesting life – well worth reading more about. Thank you, John Paul Miller, for providing such beautiful, inspirational works to the world!
Carmen commissioned me to make this ring for her daughter for Christmas.
Funnily, I sourced this piece of drusy with Kish in mind, and out of all the stones there were to choose from in my collection, she chose it! 🙂
I just love this stone, and how at the right angle it looks like a kiss.
Thanks for choosing me to make this piece for your lovely girl, Carmen!
It’s hard to know what to give a man who has everything, so I made a silver bookmark with his initials on it.
The brief for our seventh project for the course I’m doing this year was to create a piece using chenier hinge as a feature rather than a function. (Chenier is hollow tubing, in case you weren’t sure!)
I designed this pendant so that it could be worn both horizontally and vertically. The six plates rotate around a centre rod. There were a few challenging moments to my usual sadly limited patience during the construction of this piece. Titanium is an interesting but hard metal to work with.. physically hard rather than mentally! It’s a dull grey colour, and very hard to cut, file and especially drill. The gorgeous colour is achieved by heating very carefully, so it has to be riveted on rather than soldered. I added the titanium mainly because I fell in love with the blue quartz bullet stones!!
Once in a while, my fellow students and I agree, you make something that has many challenging stages in it, and many learning experiences. By the end of the process you are pretty over it – so you pop the piece away for a while, and when eventually you bring it out once more, it usually is much more pleasing than you remember! This is one of these pieces! 🙂