Fossilized Coral

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I adore fossilized coral. Doesn’t it just look edible? And the colors are so impossible - it’s hard to believe that nature can create fossils in these incredible colors.



The rusty one will eventually become a necklace and appear in my shop, but I have a strong suspicion that the raspberry colored one won’t make it any further than my jewelry box…

Slinky

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Since I spend most of my day sitting at my jewelry bench, I thought I’d start keeping my camera handy and taking some working shots. This is the start of a new batch of bangles. The wire for these is so thick that I can’t use wire cutters - I need to saw it into sections.



The bangles formed and soldered, before pickling. I love the firescale which gives these that blackened look. I’m always tempted to leave them this color.



The final product - hammered, tumbled, and oh-so-glam!

Love them? You can find these in my shop.

Sandstorm

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This is the other necklace I was working on in my last post - the picture jasper one. I love this piece of picture jasper. It reminds me of a sandstorm, or a print by Hokusai, the famous Japanese artist.



I added a bar chain to this piece instead of my usual cable chain. I think it lends a delicate, sophisticated touch that goes nicely with the pendant. I love these one of a kind necklaces - no need to worry about whether I can reproduce the piece. I have the great luxury of designing a setting specifically for each stone. How indulgent!

Love it? You can find this piece in my shop.

Into the Mists

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I’ve been buried under a rush of orders for the last couple of weeks, but I’ve finally stolen enough time to get some photos of my new necklaces. I absolutely adore this stone. It’s some type of agate - I think it’s an unusual piece of moss agate - but whatever it is, I could just fall into it. The tan areas are opaque, and the grey areas are translucent, like clouds or swirling mist.



I snagged a shot of this one in progress - it’s the piece in the back. I took this after I soldered the setting and sawed it into rough shape, but before I started grinding it. The piece in the foreground is a setting for a picture jasper cabochon. It still needs more sawing, to take off the corners at the bottom.



And this is me, modeling the necklace and trying to look casual while I wait for the self timer on my camera to go off. Did it work?

Love it? You can find this piece in my shop.

Oxidizing With Eggs

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I’ve gotten quite a few questions about oxidizing jewelry with eggs recently, so I thought I’d post about it. There are a lot of chemicals involved in classic silversmithing. I’m an organic girl, so I’m always working to find organic alternatives to the chemicals and processes involved in silversmithing. Plus, I work in my house, and who wants nasty chemicals in their house?

Pieces oxidized with eggs never turn that dark black color that you get with Liver of Sulfur, but you can get a lovely deep gray.

You’ll need:
- a really air-tight, sturdy ziploc bag (the freezer ones work well)
- an egg
- the jewelry that you want to oxidize

1) Put your jewelry into the air-tight ziploc bag. Don’t try to oxidize too many pieces at once. I usually do 1-2 necklaces or 3-4 pairs of earrings at a time.

2) Hard boil an egg, dry it off, and put it in the bag boiling hot (shell and all).

3) Blow air into the bag (like inflating a balloon) and seal it.

4) Once the bag is closed, move the egg to a corner and then crush it. Moving it into a corner means you don’t pop the bag. Be careful - the egg is hot!

5) Flip the bag every 5 minutes or so at the beginning if you need both sides of your piece to oxidize evenly. Make sure that your jewelry doesn’t end up under the egg! After about 30 minutes you can leave it to sit.

6) Check occasionally to make sure there’s no water forming between your piece and the bag, because wet metal doesn’t oxidize. If there is, move your piece around a bit to get it out of the water.

I usually leave pieces for an hour or two. Leaving them overnight will get you a really dark gray color. Please note that I generally oxidize the pieces before I set the stones, both because I don’t want water behind the stones and because some porous stones may change color during the oxidizing process.



Be sure to check out my organic pickle recipe and my organic silver polish recipe as well. And if anyone has a good organic recipe for etching acid, I’d love to hear about it!

Peacock

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I’ve spent the past several weeks collaborating with Anna, a customer of mine, on a custom necklace. She picked the stone, sent me some sketches, approved the mock-up for the setting, and picked the metals and clasp.

We ended up with this design - a hand-cut rainbow obsidian cabochon set in sterling silver with a fine silver bezel and rose gold “purse handle”. I hung it from an oxidized sterling silver chain with two handmade rose gold links and a handmade sterling silver toggle clasp. I took a few photos along the way so Anna could follow the progress of the piece.

A mock-up of the purse handle design.



The soldered setting in sterling silver with a fine silver bezel and a rose gold purse handle.



Oxidizing the peacock with a hard boiled egg.



The finished piece.



I absolutely love how this necklace came out. The rose gold was a touch of genius. Thanks Anna!


Bench Madness

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It’s been a while since I posted a shot of madness that is my workbench. Surprisingly, it looks cleaner to me in the photo than it does in real life!



For those of you who are Moo card fans, note the strategic use of old Moo card boxes to keep things organized. (They’re the small white plastic boxes in the top left corner, tucked in next to my lamp just above the orange hose from my torch and below my punches.) One is full of bits for my Flexshaft, one is full of little 2”x2” bags which have my handmade components (jump rings, melted silver balls, toggles, etc.), and one has silver scrap. Those have helped organize the madness quite a bit.

The blue ceramic bowl of water is from back in the day when I used to throw pottery. It makes a great bowl for quenching hot metal - the bottom is heavy enough that it doesn’t tip over easily.

Sunset

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We’re off to our friends’ house this evening for a gourmet barbeque and fireworks. Christian’s an incredibly good chef, and their backyard overlooks the San Diego bay where the fireworks go off. All we have to bring is ourselves, our dogs, and a bottle of wine. Deal! If I’m really inspired I might bake my famous banana bread and take that along, too.



We finally got some late afternoon sun instead of marine layer yesterday, so I managed to shoot my latest rainbow obsidian necklace. I love this deep violet - like the sky just after the sun has slipped past the horizon. It flashes gold in really bright light, too. This is another necklace that will be hard to part with, but I keep reminding myself that I only have one neck, so there’s a limit to how many necklaces I can wear!



This is my last violet stone (the other two sold). Hopefully my supplier will have some more violet stones the next time I meet up with him. This last time he mainly had blue-green stones, so my next few necklaces will be blue-green. Actually, I’m making one of the blue-green stones into a custom necklace in silver and rose gold at the moment. I’m really excited about this one - I’ll try to remember to snap off a few shots of it before it goes out.

If you’re wondering what I’m wearing at the moment, I finally got a shot of the necklace that I made for myself before I went on vacation.



This stone is one of the flashiest I’ve seen. In almost any light it shows some kind of smoky blue. I love it so much that it’s pretty much glued to my neck at the moment - just wearing it makes me happy. That’s my theory on jewelry in a nutshell - it should make you look gorgeous and it should make you happy.

Spoked

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“I can’t take the traffic any more,” Andy moaned over the phone a couple of weeks ago. “The Del Mar Fair traffic is killing me.”

“Are you ready to try taking the train?” I replied, while packing orders on the counter.

“I’m ready to try anything,” he responded. “But I’m going to need a bike. Work is 5 miles from train station.”

“Bike shopping it is, then. I know where our weekend is going.”



Off we went and spent an entire Sunday shopping for bicycles. We both used to cycle fairly seriously (I’ve been known to do 100 miles in a day), but that was well before we met each other. By the time I met Andy I had a cyst in my wrist that kept me from holding the handlebars. I had surgery to have it removed a few years ago, but we haven’t had bikes ‘til now, so we’ve never really cycled together.

We’ve been having fun the last week and a half on our bikes, remembering what it’s like to go at high speed without a protective shell (or skis). I’ve been meeting Andy at the train station in the evenings, and we’ve been trying to cycle at least 10 miles a day on the weekends, too. Now all we have to do is figure out where to store the bikes. Andy has some crazy plan for hanging them that involves the strategic use of pulleys and our 10’ ceilings. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Emerald Waves

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These gorgeous rainbow obsidian pieces are slowly trickling into my shop. I have another violet one set, but I need morning sun to photograph it, and the marine layer has not been cooperating!

This particular piece of rainbow obsidian has green and aqua curved stripes. I’ve not seen a striped piece of rainbow obsidian before. I suppose it’s the same concentric circles that I’ve seen in some of my other pieces, but the circles in the lava must have been much larger than usual, so we’re only seeing a slice of them here. I still can’t get my fill of this stone. It’s amazing!



You should see me when I meet up with my rainbow obsidian supplier - I’m like a kid at Christmas. At first glance he has these trays of glossy black stones, which are gorgeous in their own right. But when I hold them one at a time up to the light, each one reveals an incredible surprise. You never know what you’re going to see, but it’s always something new. It’s a bit hard selling them at times, because I know I’ll never see an identical stone again.

My lovely round violet stone went off to a new home in Singapore this morning, which was a bittersweet moment. But I know you guys love them as much as I do, and I only have one neck, so I can’t keep them all! I admit I kept an incredible blue one for myself, which I set before I went on vacation. I’ll shoot a picture of it at some point for y’all.