Clay Play - Jewellery 101

Determined not to leave my lovely new packet of clay sitting for too long and building up to an anxiety attack over starting something, I jumped right in.  After 2 weeks.  However, being a reasonably intelligent person, I was determined to go in prepared and not have a situation similar to the glue ooze happen.

So, tools required - something to roll, smoosh, press, work the clay on.  I swear I used to have this lovely thick PVC sheet for pastry - where the hell has that gone? Hmm, as I can't actually recall the last year I made pastry, I've probably chucked the sheet out.  So, plan B - baking paper. Check.

Something to cut with - this might require two cutting implements.  Something to cut a chunk (technical term, try and keep up with me people) off the block of clay, and something to use for some finer detail.  We've got loads of old knives in the third drawer in the kitchen (it might be the second or bottom drawer in your house, but you know the drawer I mean).

Okay, apparently we have no knives whatsoever in the third drawer - clearly left home with the PVC pastry sheet.  As the entire contents of the third drawer are now spread over the kitchen table, I'm quickly assessing and rejecting possible implements, at the same time wondering whether I'll get away with using the good knives...  No, naughty! Do not use the good knives!  So I settle on an old cake server for the cut-the-chunk-off-the-block tool.  Although I am wondering why I still have the old cake server if I no longer make pastry.

Now, being a plan ahead sort of person, I've already sussed that I'll need a hole pokey thing to make holes in the pendant I'm planning, in order to attach a jump ring and chain later on. As I was hanging onto a broken piece of memory wire for something, I feel entirely like this was the reason.

The perfect clay jewellery tools

 Plastic wrap - even without reading instructions, I've figured out that air dry clay is going to dry out just as much in a big block as a little jewellery sized piece and some wrapping will be required.  And drat 'him who hates the cling film box' as he's tossed it out and I have to struggle with cutting off a sheet of plastic wrap without wearing it.  (Although it might keep the clay off my clothes, which could be a good thing).  I'm planning on neat and tidy, but I've discovered that's not usually the case when I start a project!

I'm ready! So exciting! Cut a chunk (cake server works well) - not too big, not too small, press, roll.  And did you notice earlier what wasn't done... well catch up now. Forgot the knife for the detail work didn't we hey? (Yes, I'm including you in the blame.  You didn't notice earlier, so don't say you did).  Quick, what to use - bloody cake server's useless.  Really, is it too much to ask that it doubles as a scalpel?  It's not like it's being overworked on cakes.  Scissors are cutting implements, scissors will cut clay.  Hah! Not that exact, but I have sandpaper, she'll be right.

I also have a lid from a tablet bottle to hand (i.e. the glue ooze catcher), so that will work just like a scone cutter... or not.  Take note: unlike a scone cutter, there is another side to the cap and you can't poke your clay scone out.  You shake it.. then jump up and down with it for a while.  Then you resort to pushing it (because of course pushing it further into the lid will help!), then you turn your back on it and sneak a peek over your shoulder just in case it's too shy to drop out while someone's watching.

So, I cut/hack/chop/chunk away, I press/roll/smoosh away - it's like playdough... so much fun, and I get to call it work.  So my first clay pendants are cut, holes are poked (the hole pokey wire worked beautifully), and now we wait for it to dry.  Then some sanding and painting (I'm just going for a painted design on these first ones).  And lastly there will be something to make it shine over the top. I'm not actually sure what that might be at this stage (I never said my planning included how to finish this), but it can't be too hard to work out.

Perfect (haha) wet clay pieces

In the meantime, I'm just going to go and play, er, work, with the clay again.  Anyone got a playdough machine?  The one where it all comes out in long squiggly bits?  Can I borrow it?







Some days later...
So much for just painting. Truthfully, I can't draw. I know I come across as being a completely accomplished artist in many areas, so this will probably come as a shock to you. So the nice round pendant is a little thicker than it started because it's got about 20 coats of paint on it from painting over my woeful art, but that just makes it stronger.  The two large triangles broke when I picked them up - you can apparently roll clay too thin. Who knew?

However, the whole point of this was to learn, and I've learned heaps - what not to do, and what will work well next time. So in the end I decorated my lovely round pendant (the others are still waiting for inspiration) - dragonfly, hand coiled wire flower and a pretty purple crystal heart. I'm going with the theory that purple improves the look of any jewellery! It looks great on.  And when I wear it absolutely no one is going to stare closely enough at my boobal area to see the little imperfections! (The imperfections of the pendant, not my boobs).

My perfectly imperfect clay pendant!

What do you think for my first attempt - pass or fail?  (PS - I've just bought some actual clay tools, I think the cake server can retire to the third drawer and wait for a cake again).

My hypo cement needs to relax

I have to admit to having had a little bit of fear of the unknown, with regards to glue.  I realise how absurd this sounds, let's face it, I've been using glue in one form or another for decades without any real dramas.

First there was flour and water paste, which is even edible if you get hungry doing your pasting project. You can't really ask more of a glue than to be the snack too, can you.  Next came Clag, with its bright red, stiff plastic bristle brush that was also the lid of the bottle - a pretty clever concept all those years ago. Later on there were glue sticks, and then there were giant glue sticks when my children were young. I've never actually purchased a giant glue stick, mostly because the thought of all that glue let loose in the house with children was a bit daunting.

As I grew up, and less likely to plaster an entire room with glue, there were nifty glues that involved stirring two separate parts together.  I quite liked those - I always felt powerful mixing a potion that was going to heal a broken toy, or save my favourite coffee cup.  And of course the two part glues were ultimately improved by some enterprising person, into being in a single tube where you pushed the end up, and the right quantities of each part magically came out.  (Yes, in the olden days we had to actually judge the correct quantities and stir it together with a dead match).

Glue has really been my friend over the years, unlike sticky tape which is most decidedly my enemy.  Wrapping gifts for Christmas sees me spending eleven and a half months recovering from the trauma of having sticky tape everywhere except the present!  By the time all the gifts are wrapped I'm literally wearing a sticky tape hat, coat and mittens (they're not gloves, there are no separate fingers!) and cursing the inventor.  And I know I'm not the only one - why else would someone have invented the gift bag?

And then there was superglue. What did we do before superglue? And the question that plagues us all - how come it doesn't stick to the inside of the tube?  We all take superglue for granted these days, but it was just an amazing thing when it first came out.

Anyway, given my history of glue usage, it's sort of strange that I'd put off buying jewellery glue for such a long time.  Oh I've looked at it, researched it, admired it, and wanted it - just never quite got the courage up to buy it.  Because, of course, once you buy it you have to use it.  And what if I couldn't make a great piece of jewellery with glue?  It was like my original fear of making the first piece of jewellery with my lovely stash of beads, all over again.

But I've done it - bought the glue.  And I've used it too!  Just took a deep breath and jumped right in before I could chicken out.  What I didn't do first was read the instructions.  BIG boo-boo.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not a complete idiot, despite any evidence to the contrary.  I know that a glue that will stick anything to anything is going to need care so I wouldn't be forever carting a work bench around on my elbow (work bench is my artistic name for white fold out table from the local hardware!).

What I didn't read was what to do when you've finished gluing stuff and want to put the cap back on.  You'd think that would be the easy part really, however the glue kept oozing out of the top faster than I could catch it (we're talking a really minute nozzle here, maybe a quarter of a millimetre in diameter).  So because I was watching the ooze and popping things under it whilst trying to find an actual bucket or something to put there, I hadn't really considered the rest of the packing up part.  Like... a glue that sticks anything to anything might need something to stop it up before the lid goes on to prevent air getting into the tube.  And like glue ooze is probably not a good thing if you ever want to open the tube again.

 

 You need to understand something about the ooze - I wasn't squeezing the tube, you don't need to squeeze the tube, it ... just... oozes... and oozes... and oozes some more, all by itself.  It sort of rushes towards the light when the cap's off, as if it doesn't escape in a nano-second it might be trapped inside forever.  They should have given it the more apt brand name of Ooze.   It's actually got a boring name of GS hypo-cement.  You'd think being called 'Hypo' it would be fairly laid back rather than this frantic rush wouldn't you? Oh, light bulb moment - perhaps this is relaxed and if it wasn't hypo then it would be doing more than ooze out of the end.  (Now I'm imagining myself trying to catch a river of it gushing out, rather than the ooze... too awful to contemplate. Let's move on).

So, having found a bucket and having managed to balance this tiny little tube carefully on its pivot point over the rim (which was pretty darn clever of me!) so the ooze was going to go in the bucket, it of course stopped oozing. Figures!  But at least I can grab the cap properly, decide how I'm going to clean the ooze off the tube (tissue - and yes, it stuck to the nozzle, thanks for asking), then decide how I'm going to clean the tissue off the nozzle (dare I try a sponge?  And if a sponge, will a blue one work better than yellow?  Sometimes life's decisions are hard!)

I chose the blue which worked well.  Great decision making skills are necessary when you're a sole trader / jewellery artiste.  Yellow wasn't going to work for obvious reasons (i.e. there were only blue sponges in the cupboard).  And then came the fun part.  The inside of the cap has a teeny weeny filament attached to it that needs to be inserted into the teeny weeny nozzle when you put the cap on.  At least I worked out how it wasn't going to dry up before I used it again.

Many, many frustrating minutes later, at the point I was nearly in tears, I finally got that stupid filament in the stupid nozzle.  The nozzle hole is microscopic and therefore the filament is slightly smaller than microscopic and hey! I have old eyes - I don't do microscopic!  And the ooze had started again, because of course I had to pick the tube up to try and insert the filament and obviously woke it up.  So there I was, wiping ooze, holding tube, trying to throw tissue and sponge anywhere they weren't going to stick to something because I needed that hand to insert the filament/cap.  It was a race against the ooze, with the ooze winning.

All I wanted was one little drop of glue to make the perfect match of bee & flower

 You can't imagine the trepidation I felt the next time I opened the glue, wondering how the hell I was going to get the cap back on this time.  Although I did come prepared with bucket (and a spare, just in case), tissues, blue sponge and a yellow sponge for back up.  All for nothing as it turns out - the cap's gone on perfectly every time since!  Somehow I seemed to have passed the glue test.  So, now glue is my new best friend again.

Take a Key Ring... Please!

For the first time in my life I have a new car.  Not just new to me, but brand spanking, 15kms on the clock new.

Along with my new car came some wonderful new car things - new car smell, new car dashboard (with 3000 buttons and dials of which I will probably figure out 3 before the car and I part ways), new car floor (clean!), new car mirrors (no spider webs) and new car key.

As with all new cars, the opening jigger is now a push button (not included in the count of 3000 above) that locks and unlocks.  Another first for me.  Formerly I've just had your everyday old fashioned key.

I'm not sure what your key ring looks like, but mine looks like I have a key to open every lock in the world - and it comes with the weight of the world included.

There are 3 car keys (not including my new opener jigger), 3 front door keys (all for different locks on 2 different houses), 1 back door key, 1 back shed key, 1 garage padlock key, 1 gate key, 1 large farm shed key, 1 post office box key, 3 keys for work (2 door, 1 post office box), and 4 or 5 small keys that I'm too frightened to get rid of because as soon as I do I'll work out what they open.

Ever pick up your handbag and wonder why it's so heavy?  It's the keys!

I thought it would be nice to put just the car opening jigger and the front door key together on one key ring and ditch the others.  Of course I can't actually ditch the others I've realised, just in case I lose something and need one, so I'm still lugging them around - but I don't actually have to heft them in and out of my bag now, which is a definite bonus.

Being a jewellery artiste these days, I decided to make myself a snazzy little beaded key ring.  Kill two birds with one stone sort of thing - have a lightweight easy to find keyring, and show off some merchandise at the same time, hopefully having someone ask where I got the keyring from.  (Note: if someone asks where you got your jewellery from, it pays to be humble and modest about the fact that you've made it yourself.  Screaming "Oh my God - do you love it? I made it myself! How many do you want to buy???" whilst grabbing them by the lapels, is not a great sales strategy).

Blue is my favourite colour, so here's how I went about designing my new beaded keyring.

My beautiful new beaded key ring

1/  Choose colour
2/  Get all beads of that colour out
3/  Get some contrasting beads out
3/  Get more contrasting beads out (just in case the first 15 sorts aren't enough)
4/  Get another work bench set up, because the workspace is now taken over by blue and contrasting beads
5/  Work out a pleasing combination of blue and silver (my contrast colour) beads.  This involves laying out patterns of beads to find the pattern you like the most.  The good thing is there isn't a wrong pattern.  The bad thing is, there isn't a wrong pattern, which would narrow down the choice a little.
6/  Pick beads up off the floor, where they rolled trying to move pattern 3 and pattern 7 around.  Pattern 3 & 7 still perfectly okay.  Patterns 1 & 2, and 4 to 6 now rolling.
7/  Pick beads up off the floor from patterns 3 & 7 (bumped my head on the table picking up the others - all of them now on the floor)
8/  Try and remember the good patterns
9/  Give up, start again on new patterns
10  Find the PERFECT pattern of beads, carefully put others away, shoot fist in the air in a hallelujah moment, pick up beads again after knocking the table.

And that was the easy part!  Now I have to do is join them all together.

And - no disasters.  No funny story to tell about "the joining of the beads".  IT JUST WORKED.  A definite capital letter sentence moment if ever there was one.

The connector pins connected, my lovely pointy nose pliers made beautiful little round loop ends on the connector pins, all of the jump rings opened and closed in time to the music, and the beads all looked great together.

This was fun - not just kinda nice fun, but huge enormous satisfying fun.  So I made some more - purple, pink, blue, red and yellow.  No two keyrings are alike, so there was no boredom factor (not for me making them, and hopefully not for someone looking to buy), and they look great slung together on a rod (important for the look of a market stall).

The growing stash of beaded key rings, key clips & bag clips

My only real problem is that I'm finding it difficult to stop with the key rings.  Having found something that I can do with nothing more disastrous occurring than my standard "pick the beads off the floor 50 times" and a bumped head, I'm reluctant to move on.  I mean, there are endless combinations to make.  All I need to do is find endless people to purchase them and I'll be right.

Either that or every key in my possession, including the I-forget-what-they-open ones, will have it's very own keyring.  However, should you wish to purchase a really whizz bang gorgeous beaded key ring or key clip, just look for the woman pushing a wheelbarrow - I'll be shouting "Cockles and Mussels" as a ruse.  And if you hear of a local Key Rings Anonymous please let me know.

Lucy Lastic

After the traumatic experience of the amnesiac memory wire in my last blog, I thought that maybe I had been a little ambitious about my creative skills, so decided that perhaps beading and bracelet making with elastic might be a better way to go.

Elastic is simple because it's familiar.  Most of us have known it from early in life and love the way it does helpful things like hold our knickers up.  Whilst I'm not silly enough to think a bracelet might be constructed with knicker elastic, elastic is elastic - right?

Hah! So wrong!

You have flat and you have round.  You have different diameters, most of which are less than 1mm.  Obviously these will fit any beads you buy - or not, as it turned out.  Then you have strong and stretchy, stretchy, crystal, elastic thread (what the? Is it elastic or is it thread?), and variations that include more than one of these types.  The list was a little longer than first expected.

Some of these elastics apparently aren't good for some types of beads either.  Imagine, the humble elastic killing a bead!  Still not sure which elastic and which beads, but so far so good - nothing has shattered and I've done some quality control checks on the elastic bracelets I've made.

Quality control involves the bracelet being stretched and stretched and then stretched some more - hoping all the while they don't actually break and take out my eye.  Just in case, I got the 'significant other' to hold the end - he has a sort of bung eye anyway, so he probably wouldn't mind too much if he lost it. Luckily we didn't have to find out how much he minded being called "One Eye", as the elastic didn't even look like it was going to snap.

In the end I opted for 'strong and stretchy'.  Why stop at just plain stretchy was my thinking.  If it was strong, they would say so wouldn't they?  So why would I buy 'not strong and just ordinary old stretchy' for my artistic endeavours?

Ladder standing to thread beads is great for the calf muscles!

Of course they didn't mention just how stretchy the 'strong and stretchy' actually was.  Imagine the gloopy stuff the kid's have that, when they have it in their hands, it starts heading towards your good lounge room carpet in one enormous stretchy slimy string.  That's 'strong and stretchy' with a heavy bead on it.  It's pretty impressive, although having to stand on a ladder to thread the beads on a, by now, 20 metre piece of elastic can get quite tiring on the calf muscles after a while.  But every cloud has a silver lining - my calves are looking really toned.

Once I finally got enough beads to fit the less than 1mm elastic (how was I to know that beads came with teenier holes than that?) I was off in my artistic world designing and creating.  And as luck would have it, I had to go shopping again for more beads (more silver linings!).

Tying off the end was simple - being a scout years ago, I remembered the good old reef knot - never slips once it's been tightened.  It was rather satisfying to not feel like a complete dunce at at least one part of the process.



If I were a judge, then overall I would give my elastic skills a 9 out of 10.  After all, my knickers are still staying up.

My Memory Wire Has Amnesia

After the traumatic experience of losing all except one of my precious jump rings on the floor (which a lovely reader referred to, very aptly, as "the black hole"), I thought I'd try my hand at a memory wire bracelet.

How I imagined my new bracelet would look

Memory wire is so called because it remembers its original shape, and will always revert to that shape.  You can purchase memory wire for rings, bracelets and necklaces, generally in coils but sometimes as a complete piece with a clasp already attached. 

You can imagine, to a novice artist, that this has a lot of appeal - hell, most of it's done and I only have to get a really lovely combination of beads and bits on the wire to end up with a beautiful piece of jewellery.  So I bought my memory wire bracelets (multicoloured wire, just because I could, and it seemed more artistic somehow than plain old grey), and a pleasing variety of beads.

So not only did a memory wire bracelet sound like a relatively simple project, it also seemed like one of the smarter pieces of jewellery that you can buy. Best of all though, I felt like the possibility of it following the jump rings into who-knows-where was fairly remote.

I started off full of enthusiasm.  It didn't last long.

These lovely little bracelets have a connector (trust me when I tell you that connectors will be featuring in a future blog!) that screws one side of the bracelet to the other - obviously so you can get the bracelet on and off without dislocating your thumb.  Suppliers think of everything really.  Under the side of the screw connector, with the hole for the screw, is a crimp bead (fairly self explanatory - it gets crimped onto the end of the wire to prevent everything sliding off when the bracelet is undone), and the other has the screw piece sticking out.  "Screw piece" would be one of those technical jewellery terms I use now I'm an artist.

So I uncrimped the bead (that only took an hour or so - I think Hercules had crimped it) and prepared to thread my gorgeous beads on, in an artistically pleasing way.

Hmmm, forgot to suss out the hole size in the beads versus the diameter of the memory wire - they're both the same.  Rookie mistake, it could happen to anyone!  Luckily enough of the beads had a minutely larger hole and I managed to slide them on (i.e. push, shove, beg and plead until they moved).  As luck would have it, because I completely forgot to set it out and measure it first, the pattern of beads I'd chosen fitted exactly (I can only think that whoever watches over us must have taken pity on me).

As you might imagine, by this stage I was feeling fairly pleased with myself, even if I had sore arm muscles from the pushing and shoving - and the bracelet was looking great too.  Just had to pop the crimp bead and connector end back on and a new bracelet would be looking for a loving new home.

These things should have come with instructions!  No one mentioned that the connector should be on before the crimp bead.  And no, it didn't occur to me to look how the stupid thing went together as I pulled it apart - it was a simple connector with a simple crimp bead.  Why is it called memory wire if it can't remember how it goes together?

By the time I'd managed to pull the whole thing apart again and start over the end of the wire was sort of daggy and needed to be chopped off. And no, it didn't enter my head that if I chopped off a couple of millimetres of daggy end that my lovely pattern of beads wouldn't fit anymore and would be completely lopsided and wrong.

How my new bracelet really looks!

And no, I didn't think about how hard that crimp bead would be to get off a second time, when I put it on anyway, because I thought it wouldn't be noticeable that the pattern was lopsided and wrong.

The positive side to all of this was that I discovered my artistic temperament and invented a new swear word. I tried the new word out on the memory wire, while I was trying to work out what to do, but it didn't seem all that impressed (there's a distinct possibility it had heard it before).  I guess I just chalk it up to experience and start with a new bracelet.

And that's as far as I've made it.  The new bracelet is apparently a smidge thicker and I can't get the beads on it!  Lucky I like shopping - I need to buy new beads.

But as I write this, I can feel the lopsided and wrong bracelet looking at me from the bench - sort of like it remembers something unpleasant and might just get it into its little memory wire head to come alive, find an axe and visit me in the middle of the night.

I'm thinking elastic may be the perfect medium for me next.

Jump Ring Circus

In my newly found artistic bone (located somewhat near the funny bone) I've had to learn what all the little bits and pieces of jewellery making, known as findings, (this much I sussed out quickly...after I looked in a dictionary) are called.  Here's a few of the ones I've come across so far, and what they're used for.

First, we have chain.  Now chain isn't just chain much to my surprise!  It can be twisted, linked, belcher, double linked and so on. (Thank goodness for the dictionary and Google!), which you can buy in lengths such as a metre, or already prettied up into a necklace or bracelet length complete with the doing up bit known as a clasp.  Oh, in case you're wondering, the belcher chain doesn't actually burp the national anthem, I listened.

You can also purchase various types and hardnesses of metal with which to make your own chain, however being in the affordable category of jewellery, I've given that one a miss.  I'm also getting on in years and believe I might not finish constructing a single necklace chain from scratch before I move on to the great jewellery store in the sky.

Clasps seem to have an infinite variety of styles - toggles, lobsters, parrots (which I think might be the same as a lobster, but that could be entirely wrong so don't quote me in case the parrots or lobsters get miffed and attack me), magnetic, screw and so on and so on and so on.

Then you have connectors.  This one I worked out all by myself - they connect things (oh, go me!).  But that's the end of the simple bit, there are oodles of types of connectors as well.  I think it would be safe to say that if you imagined something you wanted to connect one bit of jewellery to another, there would already be a connector made exactly that way.

And then there are jump rings.

Jump rings are those tiny little circles of metal joining beads and charms, connectors and clasps, onto things.  They come open or closed which is exactly as it sounds - open ones have a break in the ring, closed ones don't, and they come in all different sizes.

I bought 3mm open jump rings (not knowing any better at the time and having to start somewhere).  3mm looks quite largish on the ruler, but the reality is that 3mm is TINY!  And jump rings, well,  jump!

Me on a good jump ring day

An open jump ring needs to be held between two pairs of pliers and twisted sideways to open them far enough to slip the whatever into the opening, then moved sideways back until it's closed neatly again.  Certainly sounds simple.  Until you put two pairs of plier ends onto a 3mm wide piece of metal that's about a poomteenth of a millimetre thick.  Then trust me you need to be an octopus, and a particularly dextrous octopus at that, to open, hold, slip something on and close again smoothly.

Here's a riddle for you.  If you have two hands (which I do) and each is holding a pair of pliers (which they are) which are in turn holding a 3mm jump ring, where is the spare hand that slips the pieces over the jump ring?

Not being an octopus, I've had to resort to other measures.  I've found that teeth don't work to hold any of this stuff, and neither does the man of the house who has sausage fingers (now that was a mistake - live and learn!). Throwing the piece in the air and hoping it lands in the right spot over the jump ring didn't work all that well either.

In the meantime, the second your attention wavers on the pliers in one of your hands the damn jump ring thinks it's the main event in a circus and jumps right out of them.  And bounces...and bounces...and bounces around the room.  Being only 3mm wide and a poomteenth thick they are nearly impossible to find if you don't locate them by sound before the bouncing ceases.  (If anyone knows an out of work lion tamer with chair and whip, please get in touch - I have a job for them).

As I wasn't fast enough for sound location, I tried various measures to recover the escapees.  Firstly, the 'find the lego block in the middle of the night' method i.e walk around in bare feet and you're sure to stand on one.  Didn't work.

Then I tried the 'crawl around on your hands and knees peering myopically at the dark corners' method.  I got sore knees and squinty eyes, but didn't find any jump rings.

Then I even resorted to sweeping the floor.  Hallelujah!  Found one.  Yes - one. 

So the jewellery making's on hold for a bit while I bring in the search and rescue dogs to find the remaining 299 jump rings that have to be on the floor somewhere.  Unfortunately for you all, hearing about my dexterity in making a little loop in the end of a connector pin is going to have to wait.  Sorry, but learning to live with a little disappointment every now and then is a good character building exercise.

Creative Is My Middle Name

After you look at jewellery long enough, you get bitten by the creative bug. A little of the old "I can do that - but way better" strikes you. Believe it or not, it's actually a bit more difficult than you'd first think.

Charm bracelet - pretty, but not technically challenging

First, you have to figure out what you're going to make - necklace, brooch or bracelet? I'm not including the charm bracelets I currently make in the artistic category - it's not that technically difficult to thread beads on a bracelet (I know, shocking to learn isn't it?), even though some days the beads are little escape artists. The creative part is making the whole bracelet look pretty and not like a bunch of beads bunged on any old how.  I'm fairly good at that part, but it rates close to a zero in the technical challenge department.

So, what do us artists do when we want to create our art? We go shopping! An artist must have pretty much any type of material to hand, in order to design and create said artwork - in this case, hand made jewellery. Once all the materials are in the "studio", then it stands to reason that the artistic juices flow and beautiful jewellery is the result.

The shopping part (which I flew off to do quickly) was completely daunting. Do you know how much jewellery stuff is out there? Three hours later I came home with the most pathetic little bag of goodies imaginable and then had to put it out of sight because I was so traumatised by the whole experience.

I found this very similar to shopping for fabric - I'm female therefore I must know about fabric, right?  Wrong - I don't sew, I know nothing about fabric, and find all the women making a beeline for the exact thing they're after quite scary.  How do they know what to get? And an even bigger question - how do they know what to do with it all, once they have it? Were they born with a fabric gene, whilst I got the tree climbing one?

And so it was with me and jewellery bits and pieces...er, jewellery findings. I do apologise for using technical terms, but us artists struggle with speaking the language of the ordinary mortal world.

Eventually, after about a month (I did mention I was traumatised didn't I?), I sneaked a peek in the bag of beads and findings.  Yep, they were still there.  Just checking.

The very first item of jewellery I created

Not too many days later, I just bit the bullet, tipped the whole lot across the work bench in my studio (i.e. kitchen table) and took a good look at what I'd carefully selected.  Wow, grabbed a few really nice things in my panic. And so, feeling inspired, I set to work. 

Half an hour later I had created my first piece and I WAS STRUTTING! Doing the finger point happy dance around the kitchen for my admiring fans.  Strut strut, finger point, "who's gooood!", strut strut, "oh yeah, artist at work babeeee", finger point finger point...

My fans were just so adoring that it was truly humbling. The dust bunnies came out for a closer look, and the fly on the window sill (that I really thought was, well...dead) waved a leg at me. Swear to god, it waved it's little leg and saluted me in admiration before it waved no more.


Now there's no stopping me. Creative is my middle name, and truly - an artist is born.

P.S. If anyone has an almost dead fly they don't need anymore, could you please let me know - my audience is a little thin this week.