'Daydream' shimmy bracelet

There was going to be two bracelets today, one of them a gold one, but the gold chain I ordered is way too chunky for my liking and the beads don't sit nicely on it so I've sourced some other chain elsewhere and am now waiting for it to arrive, so it's just this 'Daydream' one instead.

The colours in this shimmy bracelet remind me of sweets, fizzy bath bombs, pink-toned sunrises and unicorn-related gubbins. The glasses I used for this one are CiM Douglas Aster and Dollhouse Milky, and Effetre EDP 254, Light Sky Blue 224 and Dark Lavender 081.

All metal is high quality silver plated base metal which is lead-free and nickel safe. The bracelet is in my shop as I type this. I've reduced the prices of a few jewellery items so do pop over there and have a look-see.

In other news, it was my birthday on Saturday. Chris and I had a quiet day but on the Sunday we met my littlest sister, Emily, and her fiancé, Adam, in London as they'd got me tickets to see Ash as my birthday present.

The gig was to celebrate the 21st anniversary of their album Free All Angels which means that it's been twenty-one years since I last saw them, which was in Cardiff when the album was new.

Em and her youthful glam face,
me and my aged un-glam one

The gig was at the O2 Forum in Kentish Town which is a lovely little venue. The show was great and a highlight for me was Ash playing A Life Less Ordinary which is, as Emily would say, a banger.

If you've not enetered my prize draw yet you've still got time; I'll be drawing the winner of the lonelies beads tomorrow. Head this way to add your name to the hat.

The humble plain spacer bead

One of the things I like about these shimmy bracelets is how they take the humble plain spacer bead to a new level. I have so many oddments of glass and of those some is glass that works best on its own without any decoration, or because it's fussy and doesn't play nicely with other glass. That's where spacer beads come in.

I'm trying to not buy glass (except for clear and a limited range of staples) so I can work through all my odds and ends, and making spacers is a great way of doing that, so expect lots more of these shimmy bracelets. Also, because the beads are small, simple and fast to make, I can keep the costs of the bracelets down. (I make my spacers one at a time, one per mandrel, though. I've never got on board with making loads of them on one mandrel.)

As I said a couple of posts back, sterling silver is becoming almost too expensive so this shimmy bracelet is made with high quality silver plated base metal findings. If I'd used sterling it would cost a huge amount and the weight would mean the bracelet would need to be hallmarked. I've never gone down that route and I don't intend to because I'm a beadmaker, not a silversmith.

I've got some gold plated findings arriving soon which I'm quite excited about because I've hardly ever paired my beads with gold metal. 

The beads in this 'Glacier' bracelet are made from a third of an unlabelled rod of CiM transparent aquamarine blue, a very skinny and therefore annoying to use rod of Effetre Antique Green 852 and some Effetre Light Turquoise filigrana.

I also made this pair of earrings the other day. Again, just two plain little spacers in glorious Double Helix Theia which, in my opinion, is the best and prettiest purple glass you can get right now.

The greenish-blue disc beads are tiny Czech glass ones that I've had in my bead stash for eons. All metal in these earrings is sterling silver. 

The bracelet and earrings are in my shop.

Thank you to everyone who has entered my prize draw so far. There are way more of you than I thought there'd be so that's fab.

If you haven't yet entered, please head this way for more details and to add your name to the draw.

Making a shimmy bracelet

I thought I'd show you how I make one of my shimmy bracelets. Obviously this is just a chain with beads attached to it so it's really nothing fancy or revolutionary but I've made many of these over the years and I wanted to show you how I've streamlined the process to make quite a long and repetitive task a little bit faster.

I've watched many Adam Savage videos and he's very methodical in his approach to making and assembling. Although I'm not creating movie prop replicas or costumes like Adam does, I have picked up many helpful tips and pieces of advice from watching him. For jewellery assembly I am a big fan of what Adam refers to as 'order of operations' which is working out the best and most efficient order of doing things to complete a task in the fastest and most logical way. If you want to learn more about this I highly recommend Adam's book 'Every Tool's A Hammer: Life Is What You Make It' which I reckon is a must for any maker.

For a shimmy bracelet I get all the components I need and set them out on my work surface.

First up, beads.

These are an assortment of simple lampwork spacers I made in four shades of pink.

Next, findings.

These are all antique copper-plated brass, except for the clasp which is lead-free pewter. I've gathered quite the collection of antique copper-plated findings and components over the years and now seems like a good time to use them because much like Lurpak butter, the price of sterling silver is getting ridiculous. Sure, brass costume jewellery may not weather as well as sterling silver wearables, but it still looks nice and enables me to charge lower prices. Besides, if Vivienne Westwood can sell brass jewellery (we bought Robyn a Vivienne Westwood bracelet for her 18th) then so can I.

My first job is making the bracelet base from a length of chain, some jump rings, a clasp and a bead dangle.

Next, I thread all of the beads on to headpins, topping each one with a copper round bead.

I then create the first bend of the wrapped loop.

I do this for all of the beads.

I then work through all the headpins again, this time making the loop.

By doing this one-task-at-a-time thing I'm not constantly threading beads, putting one pair of pliers down and picking another one up. The repetitive nature of each job also enables me to be consistent so that my bends, loops and the resulting wraps will all be even.

Next, I attach each headpin to the chain and wrap the loop. I trim off the excess wire and after all the beads are attached to the chain I work along the bracelet, tucking the wire ends in and straightening everything up.

I timed this whole bracelet assembly; from gathering all the parts to finishing the bracelet took me an hour and a quarter. Not bad going for all those wraps.

I don't know if any of what I've shown and written here will be of use to you. If you're already a fellow order-of-operations devotee then I'm giving you a knowing nod. If you're not, give it a go. It's amazing how much time you can save by calculating the most efficient way of doing something in order to become a one person factory-style production line.

If you like the look of this very pink 'Candyfloss' shimmy bracelet, it's in my shop.

I'm going to be doing a bead giveaway here on my blog in the very near future, so please do bookmark me or check back soon.

Jewellery. Beads. Hair.

I can see my blog post views slowly going up so that's pleasing to me. Hello to anyone out there reading (I'm actually waving at you) and thank you for popping by.

I spent most of Sunday making bracelets. I'd made a heap of simple spacer beads and a few spotty ones, all in whites and clear, and I had no particluar bracelet designs in mind for them so it was nice to sit and faff about. I ended up with what I've always referred to as a 'shimmy' bracelet.

These take quite a while to make due to all those wrapped loops but the end result is always worth the effort.

Shimmy bracelets feel so lovely when you're wearing them and they make an amazing glassy rattle as you move.

And I also made a very simple, quite dainty bracelet by stringing a few of my beads with some seed beads and Preciosa crystals. 

Both of these bracelets are in my shop.

I had a sort out of one of my lonelies jars and I've added a strand of those to the shop as well.

I do like a strand of lonelies because they make me put beads and colours together that I never normally would and this can often spark new bead and jewellery ideas.

In non-bead news, I had my hair cut last week. I last had it cut a year ago and it was far too long and was taking me an age to wash.

I'm going greyer and greyer and I love it. I've had greys since my early twenties and I dyed my hair for years to cover them but I stopped dyeing it about six years ago because I just couldn't be arsed. Two days after the mess and time of a dye job a grey hair would be sat there laughing at me, so I gave up. My hair is how it's supposed to be at this moment in time and that's fine by me.

In crochet news, I finished the doily I was making and I just need to block it. Chris is currently using the available floor space to take photos of Blake's 7 spaceships that he's made so I'll have to wait for when his photo set-up is away until I can deploy my blocking mats. Our house is very small, you see. Both of us are in making mode all the time so we take it in turns to clutter the lounge up with stuff.

Right, I'm off to make some mandrels and then beads. Have a good Monday!

New things to show you

Good morning! I've been up since six o'clock attending to bead business. This bead business should have been attended to last night but I got all behind because we had to take a trip to Tesco for some guinea pig food as the food I'd bought for Ruth earlier in the day contained peanuts and sunflower seeds. You can't give peanuts and sunflower seeds to a guinea pig! So yes, we ventured out to Big Tesco because we know how to party on a Friday night. I went wild and got salted caramel and vanilla custard Muller Rice whilst I was there. PARTY! Oh, and Ruth got her proper guinea pig food.

Anyway, the Tesco trip meant I only had time to make one necklace last night and that was the 'I am Groot' one above. I have a little dancing baby Groot on my workbench in my shed and the new CiM Toto glass is the exact same colour as him so I just had to have a go at making a Groot bead. (If you have no idea who Groot is, he's from Guardians of the Galaxy.) The necklace sold last night and I can't make any more until I can get hold of more Toto glass.

The getting-up-early-today thing was so I could turn these beads...

... into this bracelet:

This one is called 'Irish Coffee' and it's in my shop. Again, there's only one right now as the beads are made with brand new glass that isn't yet available to buy.

Have a super duper Saturday!

Nothing particularly fancy

Sometimes I'm not in the mood or the right frame of mind to make complex beads with fancy layers and stringer and dots and stuff. Sometimes I end up making simple beads that just show off the prettiness of the glass. Yesterday was a beadmaking day like that. I fully intended to make beads with stringerwork on them and I sat and pulled quite a lot of black stringer and set to work, but my hands and brain were having some kind of communication problem. Instead of stropping out of the shed, stomping back up to the house and throwing myself onto the sofa in a mood to watch Countdown and that awful game show based on the pushy-pushy coin machines in amusement arcades, I pushed my heap of black stringer aside and made some simple hearts and spacers.

Late last night I turned some of the beads into the bracelet pictured above. The findings are silver plated because I haven't got enough sterling silver bits and bobs in stock. I took that photo early this morning and it was proper chilly out there. Got a right icy blast up my dressing gown, I did. I'm just about to photograph the bracelet properly (inside, in the warm) and it'll be for sale later today.

I had one larger heart bead and half a dozen spacers left over and those are in my shop now. They're made in CiM Aegean which is one of my most favourite glass colours in the world.

Maybe today will be a stringer day. Only one way to find out...

Pretty simple, simply pretty

I know this 'Red' bracelet is a very simple one but sometimes simple things can be nice.

It's made in CiM Bing which is a rich orange-red. I'll have a bit more to say about this glass in my next CiM testing post which will be up in a couple of days.

I've currently got three of these bracelets, two are in the shop and I'm giving the third one away in a Facebook contest. 

I hope that the current weather isn't affecting you too much. If you're in one of the flood-stricken areas then I'm sending you my bestest wishes.

'Honey' Bracelet

I made this 'Honey' bracelet this morning. The idea for it has been buzzing around inside my head for a while now. (Ha! Buzzing. Get it? ROFLOLZ!)

Anyway ...

Five Bumblebeads, some honeycomb-esque rounds and an abundance of honey-coloured spacers make this a totally shimmysome bracelet.

The chain and all findings are silver plated. There is just one in stock right now but I can make more and I can do a sterling silver version too. (That option will cost extra though.)

The 'Honey' bracelet is priced at £50.00 and is available here.

'Summertime' Bracelet

I've been planning this bracelet in my head for about a week. Today I made it a reality and I am beyond pleased with the finished piece.

It features white floral beads, strawberry beads, a bumblebee, a ladybird and a smattering of brightly-coloured spacers. I reckon it's summer in bracelet form! It makes a gorgeous glassy rattle too.

The 'Summertime' bracelet it priced at £60.00 and it's available here.

Charming

The lovely Janine of Cherished Trinkets has just started a group on Flickr specifically for posting photographs of charm bracelets. I make next-to-no jewellery these days so I sorted through my jewellery box and fished out a couple of my old creations to clean, photograph and add to the Cherished Charm Bracelets group pool.

I made this black one about three years ago. I was going for an outer space kind of feel and it contains some lampwork glass nuggets that I made along with onyx, sterling silver stars and oodles - like gazillions - of Swarovski crystals. It's a bit weighty but it is so nice to wear and it makes the most wonderful rattly noise.