Child Artwork Jewelry

 

Silversmith Lee Skalkos has established a truly original, creative business: She fabricates custom pins based on children’s artwork.

Customers can email, FAX, or snail mail their kids’ masterpieces to Skalkos’ studio, where she transforms them permanently into high-quality jewelry.

These unique keepsakes are guaranteed to hold special sentimental value for families. They’re an example of the “meaningfulness” that jewelry can have beyond fashion.

By embracing that meaningfulness, and making it the focus of her business, I think Skalkos has hit on something important (in addition to just plain fun). Kudos!

You can visit her website here.

Figural wire bending

The August 2007 issue of Bead & Button has a great article on creating shaped-wire dancing figures that attach to focal beads to make pendants.

Designer Karen Rokoski explains how to bend 24-gauge wire into these little figures using round nose pliers for the round bends and chain nose pliers for the more angular ones.

I’ve seen a similar technique used before in elaborate wire artwork (which can be very cool). What’s neat about Rokoski’s method is how she attaches the figures to one another (like at the hands and feet for these dancers), and how she fastens the entire design to a focal bead using the drill-hole and a connection at the back.

The instructions in the tutorial are nicely done, with helpful close-up photos and an (essential) graphical chart.

Interweave Hurt Book Sale

This is a pretty cool book sale by Interweave Press, the publishers of Beadwork, Jewelry Artist, and a slew of other crafting magazines and books.  Limited quantities of various titles are being offered for 50% to 80% off retail price. 

What is a “hurt book” (besides sounding kind of sad)? According to the publisher:

Hurt books are still in good condition but imperfect in quality and have minor dings such as a scratch on the cover or a bent page.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, considering that most of the books I buy from B&N and Amazon fall under that same description . . . .

Click here to see what’s still available.

Pearl bead article series & doing crochet

I just published the third article in my series on pearl on BellaOnline. For this one, I focused on the most common terminology used for pearl beads, including pearl grading and popular bead shapes. If you can think of anything to add, or if you have comments or questions, please post ‘em!

For next week, I’m planning to publish a new free project involving crochet of jeweler’s hemp. I’ve gotten back into crochet lately after a long hiatus, and I’m really liking the zen-like activity of weaving away with a crochet hook, watching TV or listening to music, or listening to nothing at all. I find it much more relaxing than most of my wire-jewelry making activities, so I think I’m going to find more ways to incorporate crochet into my designs.

The book I’m using for basic crochet instructions is an earlier book in the series that my upcoming book belongs to (Teach Yourself Visually Crocheting). The simple organization and color photographs have been a big help. I’ve also found the Crochet Me Magazine site (founded by one of the book’s authors) to be a big help.

Saul Bell Design Award Winners 2007

The 2007 Saul Bell award winners have been announced, and their creations are available for admiration online.  The competition, which attracts many advanced art jewelers, was founded in 2000 in honor of the founder of wholesale supplier Rio Grande.

I especially love the PMC Category First Prize winner, named simply “Botanical Bracelet,” by Patrik Kusek of San Francisco.  It boasts gorgeous detail without the common ”shrinky dink” look seen so often in metal clay designs.

The Second Place winner in the Silver Category, the “Egret Locket” by Satya Linak of Boise, also caught my attention.

Feeling motivated? You can find more information about the Saul Bell Design Awards on its website’s home page.

To sell on Etsy?

This has been an ongoing topic of discussion among jewelry artisans since the inception of the increasingly-popular Etsy.com, where anyone can set up an ecommerce shop and offer their handmade wares for sale online. 

When you visit the Etsy home page, you’ll immediately notice that there are some high-quality, very artistic items listed there (see ”Hand-picked items”.)  There are also many  lower-quality, “novice” level items, though most of them have very low asking prices.

As usual, the Jewelry category is the most saturated of them all.  This means more than increased “competition” in the strict sense.  It also means that your jewelry listings can be lost in the shuffle more easily (or diluted), resulting in less exposure.

Overall, it seems that Etsy is worthwhile for many jewelry crafters, although it’s certainly no panacea.  I do plan to set up a storefront there myself . . . if time ever permits!  In the meantime, here are summaries of some of the feedback I’ve received about Etsy from various sources over the past year.

• The listing fees and sales commissions are refreshingly affordable, and the integration with PayPal makes it easy to accept payments.

 

• Some artists have acquired new wholesale accounts from buyers who found them on Etsy, but many more have not.

 

• Very few jewelry artists report “high” sales volume using Etsy for their jewelry, although some have success selling “supplies” there (like beads and findings).

 

• The only reliable way to drive traffic to your Etsy site is through self-promotion; merely having an Etsy storefront typically is not enough.

• For some artists, most or all of their Etsy customers are other Etsy sellers.

• Sellers who participate in the Etsy “community” through its forums usually have more sales (because of their exposure to other sellers who are also customers); but in recent months, negative and unprofessional conduct in some of the forums has driven members away.

• Etsy shops seems to be doing relatively well with their Google rankings.

I’ll post on this topic again as I learn more about the Etsy experience for jewelry crafters.  In the meantime, I hope these thoughts help you decide whether it might be right for you.

Jewelry Artist Magazine – July 2007

The former Lapidary Journal seems to be doing well since its recent name change to Jewelry Artist. This blog-post begins a series of summaries of some of the highlights of each issue. I hope you’ll find them useful for deciding whether to pick up a copy, or for locating particular back issues.

Watermelon tourmaline is this month’s featured gemstone in Smokin’ Stones. This is a gorgeous stone with bands or gradients of pink and green hues that occur from the center of the stone outward. The colors of higher-quality specimens look most striking when sliced and bezel-set or drilled to make simple pendants.

The watermelon tourmaline project is a bold, sliced-stone and metal fabrication pendant with a briolette drop, by Helen Blythe-Hart. It involves bezel-setting the stones, sawing out a base plate, and sweat-soldering coiled wire embellishments. You will learn how setting a stone slice requires a slightly different technique than setting a cabochon with curved edges.

This month’s Trends discusses what a few contemporary metalsmiths are doing with pearls. The adjoining project, by Rachel Savane’, are Scandinavian-inspired, stylized earwires with mounted white pearls. (Rachel Savane’s creative earrings incorporate the earwire [normally a finding] into the earring design.) Learn how to create pins for mounting pearls onto heavy-gauge wire – and the trick to work-hardening the wire without hammering.

This issue goes on to cover the different types of pre-made ear findings available (see photo chart on page 30) and follows up with a simple earring project involving soldered fishhook wires with pearl drops. Learn how to use tweezers to hold interlaced rings for soldering without crushing the rings as they heat under the flame.

The main-feature technique in this issue is anticlastic raising, or forming sheet metal into curves that have opposite directions. Author Michael Good advises how to select a sinusoidal stakes and hammers, how to properly form the metal, and which gauges and widths of sheet are best to use by type of metal.

Also in the July issue:

• This month’s Faceting Design piece is a compass points square cushion cut requiring basic faceting skills, by Douglas M. Turet.
• Helen Serras-Herman writes about carving chalcedony stones.
• Learn how to make a large, hollow metal clay “tower” ring, by Hattie Sanderson.
• In Rock Corner, Claus Hedegaard examines the mysterious, crystallizing mineral cerussite.

Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist annual subscriptions are available through Amazon.com.

eBay jewelry seller faces big fine

I’ve often wondered how some seemingly large-volume jewelry sellers on eBay are able to sustain their businesses by offering high-value items with 99 cent or $1.99 starting bids. Well, at least one seller apparently was doing just fine with low starting bids because they simply logged in as different users and inflated those bids by bidding on their own items. 

If you’re pretty familiar with eBay, you’ve probably heard about this illegal trick before.  But this is the first time I’ve heard of a seller being fined $400,000 as a penalty – and being banned from participating in online auctions for a number of years.

The fine is actually part of a settlement agreement between the seller and the New York Attorney General’s office.  (According to reports, eBay itself reported the seller’s activities to the Attorney General.)

For those of us who play by the rules selling on eBay, it’s nice to see at least one of these problems addressed by the criminal justice system. 

Pearls with gemstone cores

In a recent article on BellaOnline.com, I described very generally how cultured pearls are made by artificially inserting irritants – like small pieces of shell – into the tissues of mollusks.  For salt water (or sea) pearls, the irritant traditionally is a tiny piece of mother of pearl (the pearl-like material that lines the insides of mollusk shells).

Artist Chi Huynh is breaking that tradition by using round gemstones as the irritants, or nuclei.  His creative designs were much admired at this year’s big jewelry show in Las Vegas.  Chi implants oysters off the coast of Vietnam with high-quality semi-precious gemstones.  (Well, perhaps he hires someone to do this for him, following his specifications.) The results are beautiful black (Tahitian-style) pearls with stone centers. He then artfully carves the pearl nacre to expose the gemstone beneath. This PDF of a page from Modern Jeweler  provides a nice example photo.

Chi was previously best known for his “Diamond in a Pearl” collection, where he sets diamonds into pearls. You can browse many of his unique designs at the Diamond in a Pearl website.