Another craft fair...

Well, I've bitten the bullet and have decided to do another craft fair - on Saturday July 3rd, at the Columcille Centre in Morningside, here in Edinburgh:

It's organised by Craft Fairs Scotland  but also has its own website and blog. 

You may remember I did my first craft fair last May in Portobello - organised by the same company - so I'm sure this one will be just as well organised.  

I've had mixed feelings about doing another fair - mostly because my Etsy shop has been rather busy lately and I'm slightly worried about being able to keep up with demand as my pieces are so time-consuming to make.  After a lot of thought though I decided that the face-to-face feedback you get from being at a fair is so valuable it was worth giving it another go.  Many of my current jewellery styles have been directly developed from constructive criticism or comments that people made at the last craft fair - mostly about making the lines of my jewellery shapes softer and more curvaceous, which let me to make my curved necklaces:

'Solferino'

and my Paisley-shaped brooches:

'Terne'

-so that sort of feedback is worth doing the fair for in itself.

So now I just need to work on building up a selection of items and planning how I'm going to coordinate everything with the Etsy shop - I think I'll avoid listing online everything I have made, and I also plan to make use of the handy 'vacation mode' in the shop for a few weeks before the fair just so I'll have a clear idea of what pieces are available to show.

I have to say the bit I enjoy most is doing the practice run-through of my table set-up :D - watch this space for photos closer to the time!

Silver and felt necklaces... the sequel!

In Autumn 2008 I started developing some ideas for a series of sterling silver and embellished felt necklaces during my jewellerymaking evening class.  I wrote about the first prototype here, but never got around to finishing the other pieces I started.  In fact, I confess that I all but forgot about my selection of silver pendant bases that I had made that were hiding in my metalsmithing workbox.

Well, they finally made it to the top of my projects list again, (I have to admit that actually I've been a bit scared to finish them, as working with silver always seems terribly serious!) and I have made two more prototypes:  'Quezacotl' and 'Materia'  (if anyone can make the Otaku link to those names then I'll sort you out with a special prize :P).

I sawed sheet silver into a tag shape, filed the corners to gently round them, and then added a matte brushed texture and an asymmetrical hammer texture pattern.  Then I made the bezel settings from tiny strips of thinner silver sheet and soldered them onto the base tag.  The pieces of felt are made with silk hankie fibre, and embellished with tiny glass beads and hand embroidery stitches.

'Quezacotl'

I'm still not totally sure about jewellery photos featuring live models, but I wasn't sure how else to best show the necklace's scale...

And here's 'Materia':

So satisfying...

Phew!

Only a couple of yelps of frustration, and surprisingly few intractable knots :D - yay!

Spring clean...

I have the week off work this week, and one of the things I have vowed to do is to sort out this:

I've been feeling guilty about this big embroidery floss spaghetti for a while. I'm not even sure how it got like this!  Whilst all my yummy space-dyed threads are neatly bobbined and arranged by colour in boxes, my poor embroidery flosses are treated like second class citizens languishing in this ball in an old bag.  Well, not for much longer!!  (That's if I can actually untangle them... watch this space!)