Bling, bling and a whole lotta bling!

I've finally got some spare time to do some of my own work, which is fun!

 

Last week, one of my students brought a ring in, which had broken, she wanted to repair it. It was big, chunky, and beautiful. I just had to have a go and make something similar myself, and now it is in the kiln!

 

I have taken a lot of photos of the whole process, as I might write it up as a step-by-step project. It is a ring made by simply drawing the design with an Art Clay 650 syringe, directly on the mandrel. It is pretty easy, so great for someone just starting out. I've also added an advanced step, as I'm setting a seriously big blinging stone on the ring. This is also done with the syringe.

 

I can hear my kiln clicking away in the background, and I can barely wait to get the ring out. I love big, blingy, sparkly stones, and the one set on this ring ticks all the boxes. It is a deep champagne coloured, triangular, 12 mm big cubic zirconium. Beautifully facetted. Sparkly... Blingy...

 

With the stone set, the ring certainly isn't a pretty, elegant, daintly little ring; it's more of a in-your-face, look-at-me ring.

 

Without the stone, it is a cute, unusually shaped ring, and using a smaller stone, it could be done to look elegant.

 

It is easy to change a design to fit what you like - take parts of it, and ignore the bits you don't like. Replace them with something else, or simply leave them out.

 

I'll post a photo of BlingBling when it is finished. Here is a taster.

Working with Argentium Sterling Silver

If you are up to date on your jewellery raw material you have probably heard Argentium Silver being mentioned lately. Well, here is a blog, talking only about this great new material. If you haven't tried it yet (like me!), I'm sure you will soon. In the meantime, learn more about it here. If you've never heard about Argentium Silver, take the time to read more on this blog.
Working with Argentium Sterling Silver: "Argentium Sterling is simply a modern adjustment to the traditional sterling formula. It is still 92.5% pure silver --it has to be in order to be called 'sterling'-- but it replaces some of the traditional 7.5% copper with a rare metallic element called Germanium."

Market, lies and websites.

Interesting discussion about jewellery and contemporary artists. Click to read the full article.
ALTERNATIVES contemporary jewellery - Unlimited
: "So, what exactly is the value of jewellery today? Does it represent what it represented in the past? Probably not. Industry and fashion have changed the approach to jewellery by removing its symbolic and ancestral value. In a society where much importance is given to superficiality, jewellery has been deprived of any cultural value thus limiting its understanding and consequently its distribution. In an interesting article published here in the Klimt site, Ramon Puig Cuyas evidences the fact that jewellery is unable to be the sole protagonist of our time, in the sense that today jewellery has to share its symbolic role with items that have become very powerful status symbols, like cars, mobile phones, internet and have in a way replaced what jewellery used to stand for. We can do without jewellery today, but we cannot go without being connected to a computer.

Thus, what is the sense of jewellery in a society that has stepped into a new century with a creed for money and technology?"