Fiery Hearts Designs

I am expe­ri­enc­ing some dif­fi­culty in regain­ing a bit of focus regard­ing jew­elry designs. I have not done any­thing unique for months. I have been think­ing about pre­vi­ous designs, scan­ning my sup­ply sources, and sur­vey­ing all the lovely stones I have in my trove.

I want my designs to be unique, touch­able, beau­ti­ful to see and com­fort­able to wear. I want designs that endure the cur­rent fash­ion col­ors and styles so that it will not end up under a pile of newer things by the end of the year. Finally, I want each piece to have an owner out there unknown when I make it but who will ulti­mately find it and love it. In the case of com­mis­sions I really try to get a sense of the per­son so that the piece I make is uniquely her own.

I pre­fer organic and natures con­tri­bu­tions to com­po­nents such as the car­nelian ron­delle beads in this piece. I make some com­po­nents from metal clay, poly­mer clay, and sil­ver. I pur­chase most of the find­ings and of course the beads and cabo­chons. I also include odd items that I find in my trav­els. Some­times I take apart jew­elry pieces and reuse the com­po­nents in new designs.

I do not draw well (actu­ally my draw­ing is awful and I need to take a course) so most of my designs are devel­oped by rumag­ing through my sup­plies or a cat­a­log or sup­ply store along with men­tal activ­ity in the shower or the driver’s seat. Then I lay­out pieces and work with them. Some­times I use sub­sti­tute items to do mock­ups and some­times I just start all over.

When I do wire work I fre­quently use inex­pen­sive art wire to work out the design on a cabo­chon or other item that I might be wrap­ping. I use clay to mock up some pieces before using the fast-drying expen­sive sil­ver clay. I also wear jew­elry to make cer­tain it wears well, hangs prop­erly, and is com­fort­able. Some­times I sim­ply have to wait for a stone or other item to speak to me so that I can under­stand what it wants to become. Yeah, who knew I could be so woo woo.

Any­way, I need some crit­i­cal feed­back and direc­tion. So this is your oppor­tu­nity to weigh in. The piece in this post is inspired by a piece I bought years ago when I lived in Guam. That piece was lapis, multi-strand, no accent beads and a square pen­dant that was ori­ented sim­i­lar to this one. In fact that neck­lace was uncom­fort­able because of the spac­ers that had been used to align the strands so I took it apart and used all the com­po­nents in my own designs.

Back to this piece. It was one of the first neck­laces I sold at White Mist of Cot­ter. The per­son who bought it took it to Ten­nessee or Geor­gia and based on her feed­back to Julia it is one of her favorite neck­laces and a sta­ple in her busi­ness wardrobe. I love hear­ing that. I reworked this piece sev­eral times. I am not a fan of sym­me­try and avoid it when I can thus the design does not have match­ing accents but I do give a nod to sym­me­try with the place­ment of the accents. I also do not feel it nec­es­sary to use only one metal. I used brass, sil­ver, and pewter in this. I loved the col­ors. They are warm and reflect light. Car­nelian is one of my favorite stones to work with.

I do not expect you to give raves about this piece. What I am look­ing for is some crit­i­cal design feed­back. What does this piece tell you. Did I hit the mark based on my design goals?

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