I’ve been chopping up bits of fabric and playing with bits of ribbon and working out how best to package my Christmas pudding charms/coins (or tokens – still can’t decide what to call them!?).

And I think I’ve pinned it down, so I’ll give you a bit of a sneak preview – and of course I welcome any constructive criticism you feel like throwing my way!

Here is the final package containing the coins in their little box and a little folder with recipes for Christmas pudding and brandy sauce and other information.

And here it is all opened up so you can see some of what’s inside – the pudding tokens are wrapped up inside the little plastic box.

As I mentioned in a previous post I’m also awaiting delivery of some lovely looking fabric with cherries on it which I plan to use for Australians who purchase the pudding coins. For those who don’t know, cherries are everywhere at Christmas here and are very much associated with the festive season.

I still need to get the final set of vintage Christmas designs etched onto silver and cleaned up, but what do you think of the packaging at least?

Just a little update to say that these are still definitely in the pipeline. I hope to have the first saleable Christmas pudding coin/token packs up on Etsy early next week – fingers and toes crossed!

Today the fabrics I ordered from the Fat Quarter Shop arrived – and they are as lovely as I’d hoped! The Christmas baubles fabric is different to what I had expected – I had thought the baubles would be bigger – but this is a good thing as I was worried they’d be too large for the little boxes I’ll be putting the tokens into.

The other bright pink fabric is for … well, I don’t know! I might use it for wrapping pieces if I send out samples of my work. I just couldn’t resist it! I confess that I’m a sucker for lovely fabrics, even though I can’t sew to save myself and don’t really have the time or inclination to learn properly (I have isssssues with sewing!).

Over the next few days I will be cutting up the Christmas fabric to the right size for wrapping things up, plus I’ll be printing out the Christmas pudding and brandy sauce recipes along with instructions for care and use of the tokens and will be doing an etch of a few sets of the actual tokens themselves.

So keep your eyes peeled – by Monday or Tuesday next week I hope you’ll have pretty Christmas tokens to look at (and buy!) in my Etsy jewellery shop. Of course I will also let you know via Make Me, otherwise known as this very blog.

Yes, I’ve been slaving away tonight. I’ve been doing all sorts of things, but I have been concentrating on a spot of production jewellery making – mostly piercing (or sawing) of a few bits and pieces which are now in need of making up into finished work.

The large blossom and the chrysanthemum are the closest to being finished. The chrysanthemum is for a custom order for the lovely Diana. It needs to be tumbled and then hung on two strands of deep red silk thread. I’m also making some extra thread pieces for Diana in different colours. Diana tracked this design down in my exhibition jewellery and object gallery.

The other pieces are some teensy blossoms and leaf pieces, all of which need cleaning up – filing, sanding and tumbling. The leaves need some wire soldered to them to be made into earrings and the blossoms need holes drilled in them so they can be used for chains and earrings.

So there you go – this is what I do at almost 4am in the morning! But now I will love and leave you and finally head for my nice bed.

Night night!

I’ve just had a thought that perhaps people who come across my blog, website, Etsy shop, Flickr account and other places might wonder if I have some terrible problem when it comes to spelling ‘jewellery’ (or is that ‘jewelry’?).

It will, of course, get lost to the mists of time, but I’ll do a bit of explaining here as I hate to imagine people thinking I can’t spell!

Unfortunately, I’m starting to sell and promote work online in a field which has two different spellings in English, depending on where you’re from. The Americans at least (and perhaps some other English speakers too?) spell it ‘jewelry’, while the British and Australians use what I prefer to think of as the correct (oooh – controversial!) spelling of ‘jewellery’.

Given that people are going to be searching online for work like mine using both terms I’ve made a decision to use a smattering of both in whatever I do.I probably lean a bit more towards ‘jewelry’ in titles and the like because I know that’s going to be the dominant term used – even British English spellers are likely to use American spellings when looking for things online as there are frequently a lot more results (well, I do this anyway).

When I take over the English-speaking world I’ll be sure to make everyone spell the word with more letters as it looks more elegant, but for now I will make certain that all my bases are covered!So I can spell – honest.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be featured on Etsy’s home page again today – this is the second time in a fortnight so I really am feeling very lucky!

And not only that, but today’s home page is special! It’s the very first one chosen from someone’s Etsy Treasury list – a new feature which has just been unveiled publically (although many Etsiers have known about it for a while now).

The Treasury is a kind of shopcast with lists of items selected by Etsy members as recommendations, except that lists only exist for 48 hours (we have been told to ‘embrace the decay’! I’m not very good at that, I admit)

To celebrate this new gadget Etsy will be featuring a Treasury list as the home page for the next little while, which will be very interesting to see.

So thank you very much to frombelgiumwithlove, a fellow Etsy seller of lovely things who chose today’s list – and has informed me that my cherry blossom pendant was her inspiration (which is why it’s first on the list).

You can also read about today’s special home page (with some really lovely feedback from other users) here on the Etsy forums.