Fiery Hearts Designs

Archive for the ‘design process’ Category

My sta­ple always-sell pieces are bracelets using mem­ory wire, a stiff wire that retains its cir­cu­lar shape,and beads. For some rea­son women really love them and are will­ing to pay $35 to $50 for one. They are com­fort­able and easy to wear. The tech­nique for mak­ing the bracelets is very easy and usu­ally takes about two hours. Sim­ply cut the wire, make a loop with pli­ers at one end, slide the beads onto the wire, fin­ish with another loop. The real work is in cre­at­ing a one of a kind unique piece each time.

I usu­ally decide on a base color palette and select a pri­mary bead. These tend to be six or eight mil­lime­ter and either round or ron­delle, a slightly flat­tened bead, usu­ally a gem­stone such as agate or jasper. I typ­i­cally use a mix­ture of met­als includ­ing ster­ling sil­ver, pewter, cop­per, and gold. I select accent beads that are larger, longer or oth­er­wise dif­fer­ent. These beads can be tubes, ovals, rounds, or other shapes. I usu­ally include glass beads of one kind or another and like to have at least one lam­p­work bead. I also use wood, seed, shell, and other types of beads. I typ­i­cally fin­ish the ends of the bracelets with a charm or a drop bead.

I try to think through the design before I exe­cute but I have been known to change the entire design and slide every bead off the wire. I never make more than one of a par­tic­u­lar design. My bracelets are asym­met­ri­cal since I do not repeat a spe­cific pat­tern only a gen­eral theme of color and shape. I also con­sider where the accents fall on the bracelet so they are dis­trib­uted for bal­ance of design and com­fort in wear­ing along with ensur­ing the bracelet will drape on the arm nicely. The bracelets are usu­ally from four to eight cir­cles. An impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion in mak­ing these bracelets is the weight of the bracelet on the arm.

When cre­at­ing a bracelet with a spe­cific per­son in mind I will include items that have mean­ing to the per­son. I made one for my daugh­ter that included a small maple leaf in acrylic that she had given me as a mem­ory of a fam­ily trip to Canada. I made one for myself that included a large spe­cial bead that my mother-by-marriage gave me.

This morn­ing I deliv­ered the seven-strand bracelet in these pho­tos to White Mist of Cot­ter, the arti­san shop where my jew­elry is sold. It was the first piece I have done this year. I took a week to think about this design and selected the pri­mary beads when I vis­ited my sis­ter and dragged her along to a bead store in her area. I selected an agate that has been stained turquoise. The stain­ing of agate is a cen­turies old prac­tice of enhanc­ing the pat­terns of the stone. Idar-Oberstein, Ger­many is famous for the agates from the region and for the local skill in stain­ing these stones.

The sec­ond color is based on the four mil­lime­ter yel­low jade ron­delles. I included a lam­p­work bead that I pur­chased in Ore­gon three years ago and some recy­cled glass beads from Ghana. I also included a Thai Hill Tribe sil­ver bead and seven cop­per tube beads, four long plain and three short designer. I fin­ished this bracelet with drops made from the agate.

I always see flaws in the exe­cu­tion after I deliver the piece. In this photo I see that the lam­p­work bead should have been a few beads fur­ther along so that it would have been oppo­site the long cop­per tube and would not have cre­ated such a wide sep­a­ra­tion between the two strands of the bracelet. Per­haps I am the only one who would notice this. Julia, the owner of White Mist, sent an email telling me the bracelet, priced at $45.50, sold before the day ended. A woman from South Car­olina walked into the store wear­ing the exact same col­ors that are in the bracelet.

I always say that there seems to be just the right per­son for my pieces. Some­times they come together quickly and other times they take a while to find each other. I take great plea­sure when the jew­elry and the right woman come together so Julia always finds out where my jew­elry is going to live.

In the pre­vi­ous post I men­tioned metal clay as one of the jew­elry media that I like work­ing with. One com­ment asked about it. This post chron­i­cles my first attempts with pre­cious metal clay (PMC). Metal clay seems to be a mis­take when one first hears of it.  Briefly, it is actual pow­dered met­als, most often sil­ver because of the cost but also gold and most recently bronze, mixed with clay and water. The clay can be molded, shaped, and carved then dried. It is then fired in a kiln or with a hand­held torch or small gas fired stove depend­ing on the type of clay. The clay burns away leav­ing ster­ling sil­ver or 14k gold. The clay can be com­bined with wire and with some very hard gem­stones. The ring at left, Twisted Twig Ring, is made from ster­ling sil­ver wire and pre­cious metal clay. The wire formed the basis for the ring and the clay, in the form of a paste, was used to fuse the wire. I pol­ished and shaped and sized the ring with filing.

How­ever, the ring was not my first effort with the PMC (which is also a spe­cific brand and type of the clay) My first efforts were a bit more hum­bling not to men­tion some wasted ster­ling sil­ver. My first effort was to cre­ate a free form sil­ver heart. My first effort used art wire as an arma­ture for the heart which was then cov­ered with the clay. 

The wire did not tol­er­ate the tem­per­a­tures of the fir­ing and the clay was not con­sis­tently thick in all parts of the heart. The result was that my artis­tic vision was achieved but it fell into sev­eral pieces which remain in my scrap sil­ver container.

The next effort, I sim­ply sculpted the heart free form with no arma­ture. That worked well, but I did not take into con­sid­er­a­tion that the shrink­age with metal clay is really very low. So, I used triple the a mount of clay that I actu­ally needed. The result was a heart about one inch by three quar­ters of an inch in dimen­sion. I embell­ished the top of the heart with clay extruded from a syringe so it did not take a high pol­ish (done fre­quently by tum­bling the sil­ver with steel pel­lets. The final result is a bit heavy but I threaded a mul­ti­color silk rib­bon through the chain and I enjoy wear­ing my Pi of Hearts.

More tomor­row.

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?