Twisted Links

So I was feeling the creative juices flowing (sort of like dribbling, but far better) when I had this brilliant idea of a beaded bracelet using a twist link chain as the base.  You see lots of ordinary link chains with beads, but I quite like the softness of twist link chain - it's really lovely to wear.

10 out 10 more experienced jewellery artists will be going "oh oh" at this point, and 10 out of 10 of them would be right!

I will now give you a rundown of what turned into a huge and monumental amount of time spent on a beaded bracelet.

It was around 9pm when I started on the selection of beads.  This is almost as good as seeing the finished piece - you get to drag everything out and look at it all for a while in a little trance.  If anyone interrupts you in the midst of this bit, you vaguely wave a hand to go away and mumble things like "creating", "thinking", "nearly got the perfect image in my mind". It works a treat when you want to be left alone - it also (at my house) nearly always guarantees a steady supply of hot coffee appearing without me asking for it!

I'd recently bought some flat oval crystals in a particularly nice shade of purple which, when the pin or thread runs through, gives the appearance of a leaf with a central vein.  As I was dying to use them for something, this seemed like a good time.

So I put away everything non-purple (or that wouldn't really go with purple), stared and muttered some more, drank the next coffee, then had a Eureka! moment (there are only so many coffees you can consume before you get a little high and shout Eureka! slightly louder than intended - just a word of caution).

Add lots of varying shapes and tones for textural interest, and we're off and racing.  Or... we're off and crawling, as it turned out.  This is an hour into the bracelet.

One hour and counting

Yes, that tiny little beaded bit in front of the pliers is after an hour!  At first I thought I was doing something, well, wrong.  I know, it's a bit hard to believe that would happen, so I discarded that idea.  At this stage, I just put it down to not knowing the tricks - it would obviously get quicker and easier now that I knew what I was doing.

Two hours of solid work (with no coffee! - Where is the coffee boy?)

Guess what - it didn't get quicker, it didn't get easier, and I didn't learn any tricks of any value except for one - don't use twist link chain to attach oodles of beads.  Those teeny tiny little spaces between the twists are even teenier and tinier when you're trying, with tired eyes, to insert what seems like a mere wisp of metal ring or pin through them.  

Insert multiple swear words at this stage, because whatever you say I can assure you won't be as awful as what came out of my mouth after 3 hours of really really hard work.

After three hours, new swear words aimed at twist link chain have been invented by moi

To cut what turned into a saga much shorter, it was 2am before the bracelet was finally finished!  Yes, I was silly enough to stay up until it was done, mostly because I couldn't face the thought of getting up the next day and starting on it again.  I was quite worried that if I collapsed into bed before completion then it would sit there, unfinished, forever - particularly as I'm fairly sure that it would have been just as time consuming undoing all the hard work as it had been to do it in the first place.

Dancing naked around the bonfire crying Hallelujah! It's finished!

Once upon a time I had a website review done from a bunch of random people, whereby one of these "learned" people compared the MinzBeadz website with a blog from an unknown artist (fairly sure said artist must have been a friend of his).  In the comparison he felt that Unknown Artist 'showed their DNA' in their blog and "studio" photos, and I could do well to follow that example.  

For the record, Unknown Artist's photos were actually blurry (might have been a bit too much of that messy DNA on the pieces, who knows), and the "studio" looked pretty much like my workbench with a towel on it.  However, I digress... this learned reviewer would be pleased to know that this particular bracelet is now reeking with all the DNA it can handle with my blood, sweat and tears.  And I tried doing a blurry photo or two in an attempt to reach the standard set by Unknown Artist, but unfortunately couldn't manage it.  Sorry everyone, you'll have to be patient and try not to cringe as you view my clear photos with no towel under them. Oh, I just twigged - the towel must have been to wipe up the excess DNA - duh!

So whenever you're tempted to wonder why hand made jewellery can be expensive - think of my bracelet and you'll appreciate that some pieces are way under priced for the amount of work that may have gone into it, - you're actually getting a bargain.

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.

And the Winner Is...The Duck

Well, it's been quite some time between blogs. What with one thing and another - winding up the first MinzBeadz end of financial year, still trying to master Facebook, going to markets, re-jigging the website, and generally running around like a lunatic with no time to scratch -  let's just say I've been busy!

So what have a learned during my first year (or part thereof) in business for myself, you might ask? (And even if you didn't - bad luck, because I'm going to share some of my fascinating insights).

Like me back or else!

• I've learned that Facebook is neither a book nor do you see people face to face. And just today I learned that there are some really peculiar people (and I use the term 'people' loosely) who want you to like their page - apparently an extremely clever dog has now liked mine and wants a return like. Dream on dog, dream on.  

• I've learned - a little anyway - how to talk about my business without feeling like I'm that excruciatingly boring person that everyone avoids at all costs. I count myself lucky that most people don't feel that way, or are way more polite than I give them credit for and don't show it. (Thank you to those polite and well brought up people).                                                                 
• I've gained a better understanding of what my "unique selling point" is, and might become, in having found a little niche area for MinzBeadz - sourcing jewellery for people, which has enabled me to help, and get to know a little, some really lovely people in the past months.

• I've learned that getting people to take 30 seconds to look at your website can be likened to  pushing the proverbial "stuff" uphill - and I can't think of any reason other than laziness! (Oh, just thought of one - they might be the polite people who I've bored, so I take back the lazy comment for those people).

Freebie 0 VS Duck 95

• I've learned that, despite the number of articles I've read on what makes a Facebook page engaging, following the formula can work really well one day and not at all the next!  And that it can be excruciatingly difficult some days to even give away something for nothing, to the point you think you're the only person left in the world (or the world of Facebook, which some may think is the whole world, but us older and wiser folk know there's more out there), and 3 seconds later 95 people hit the like button for a photo of a duck. Isn't it great that we're not alone and the duck likers are still watching us... I really feel comforted knowing that.

A lot of what I've learned in the last few months relates to people - myself and others - and how they behave.  Of course I always behave wonderfully, but there's some really, um... (trying to think of a word that isn't a swear word), um....well shit, there's some real bitches out there!  And we won't dwell on them because in the end, karma will take care of them. It always does.

Another really important thing I've learned is that Zen Cart (the shopping cart software on my website) does not induce a zen like state and would be more aptly named Wonky Wheel.  Wonky Wheel was written by someone cleverish, and then tested by someone cleverish, then they patted themselves on their mutual cleverish backs and gave it out to innocent bystanders for free. Just to laugh their cleverish laughs at our attempts to understand what they mean with their software.

It is impossible to believe that they gave Wonky Wheel to the average person, asked them to use their help file, then paid attention to any feedback. 

Yesterday I discovered that there does not appear to be a way to have a screaming red sign jump out at you if you haven't chosen a shipping option! I mean really...are you joking??  The default "choose your shipping area" option, which I can't seem to shift from being the default, just bypasses charging any postage costs if you don't go in and select your country. What's with that?

Consequently, we now have one very happy customer who was charged no postage, and international customers will have to email and request a postage fee and be invoiced separately. So much for fully automated and saving me time and energy.  So if anyone is a Wonky Wheel expert, it would be wonderful to hear if it's actually possible to have a loud red sign that waves a flag, saying something along the lines of 'YOU HAVEN'T CHOSEN A SHIPPING METHOD YOU DODO, WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT ENTIRE PAGE WAS ABOUT".

And having just passed the end of the financial year, I've remembered how horrible finalising all the accounts is. Stupidly enough, I'm struggling more with the formula for my stock spreadsheet for the new year. Every night, right before I slip into sleep, I have the formula worked out, then in the morning it's totally vanished and I sit staring stupidly at an Excel page. What's worse is that I know it's just a simple formula. I'm taking the position that once the books are finalised and I have time to stop running around like the aforementioned itchy lunatic, that it will just come to me in daylight.

I know, I live in dreamland...but it's my dreamland and I like it here. The natives are friendly and I'm the Queen.