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 managed to get a list onto the shiny new Etsy Treasury which features some of my favourite pieces of jewellery for sale on Etsy. My list is entitled too much jewelry on etsy?.

Note that this list will expire in just under 48 hours of posting this entry so the link above will no longer be valid after that time.

As I have commented on my list, too much jewellery is never enough! Except when it’s rubbish of course … and there is a fair bit of that on Etsy, I admit. Although that’s just my very biased opinion, of course!

But amongst it all there really is a healthy amount of very beautiful, well made and clever jewellery - of both the precious and non-precious variety. Some of it is by makers who are already well known there for their engaging work, but there are also some very good and relatively undiscovered finds too.

One such find is howlindoggie, a fellow Sydney-based jewellery maker and someone who studied at the same place I did - Sydney College of the Arts, which is part of the University of Sydney.

Have a look at howlingoddie’s Etsy shop as there are some beautiful and beautifully made pieces to enjoy.

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.

Given the wild enthusiasm of Little Miss Meshell (who has an Etsy shop with gorgeous things, as well as a Flickr account and - for reasons we are both yet to fathom - a Myspace account) and others for the idea of making pure silver Christmas pudding tokens, I am going to do it!

Today I’ve been fiddling with the artwork I want to use (changing one or two of the images used for etching the set featured above) and have also been figuring out packaging for them. I think because they’ll be something special to keep and pass on that it would be good to package them up as nicely as I can - and particularly to make them look like a lovely little gift.

So I’ve been to my jewellery supply shop and purchased some teensy black plastic cases with clear lids and some padding inside to put the tokens in. I picked up some nice paper for printing recipes and instructions onto and some card to put the paperwork in. Plus I’ve ordered some lovely Christmas fabrics for wrapping everything up and picked up some ribbons to tie it all together.

As for the other details, my artwork fiddling today has resulted in there being probably seven tokens per set. And I’ve come up with a very vague sort of a price taking into account the fairly large amount of silver and the labour - roughly US$68 plus postage - don’t quote me on it, but do let me know what you think!

Thanks for the encouragement, Meshell (or is that obsession!?)!

This is my delicious new Flicka laptop bag, handmade by the lovely Alice - you can find Alice’s shop at flickaalice.etsy.com.

It arrived yesterday and of course it looks even more gorgeous in the flesh than in photos. It’s very well made, certainly stands out from the usual laptop bags and my Mac Powerbook fits perfectly.

Given the love affair I confess to having with my Mac (even though it is getting on a bit now) I felt it was apt to get a really nice protective bag to carry it about in when I take it elsewhere to work - and now I’ve got one!

Flicka bags come in various sizes, with a myriad of fabric designs available and they are made for both Macs and PCs - although why you’d want to put a nasty PC in such a lovely bag is beyond me ;P.

(Note to self: must be less mean to PC users in public).

So that’s a hearty recommendation from me. If you’ve got a laptop or know someone who does, you should go shopping!

I’m seeking opinions from all over about these, so feel free to weigh in!

It’s an old English/British tradition to have a home cooked Christmas pudding which has silver coins or tokens mixed into it - this is something my family has always done. If you find a coin it will bring you luck for the year.

The tradition started dying out as silver coins were replaced by base metals, which people felt (correctly, I’m sure!) weren’t a good idea to cook with. However, my Nan always had a stash of threepences which she would exchange with us for ‘real’ money if we found them in our piece of pudding. Over the years lots of the coins went missing and when she sadly passed away a few years ago the coins were inherited by my aunty.

My Mum kept nagging me to make a set of special silver tokens for her to use in her own puddings to keep the tradition alive. And so finally last year I managed it and made her a set out of pure silver with vintage Christmas illustrations etched onto them. And they were a hit!

And here is a little set of them as made this year.

So this year I’m thinking about making sets and packaging them to sell to people who would like to keep this tradition going - along with my family’s old recipes for pudding and brandy sauce. They’d be an heirloom that could be passed on, of course.

But will anyone outside of my family actually want something like this?

I now know that Christmas puddings simply don’t feature in the US and I’m not sure how many people in the rest of the Anglo world would make their own puddings (although the tokens can simply be slotted in even after cooking) or would know about this tradition.

Let me know what you think!

I’ve finally managed to get around to setting myself up on flickr - you can find me at www.flickr.com/photos/simonewalsh/.

Tonight I’ve put up a few recent jewellery pics - to show off new work and my new camera! I’ll add more of them as I take them (and as I actually get stuff made, of course!).

There’s also a few of my favourite photos from my trip to wonderful Istanbul earlier this year - I hope they inspire people to visit as it really is an amazing place.

I’m currently awaiting bribe money from my friend James (the most important resident of Istanbul, he assures me!) so he can be certain that I don’t put up any photographs of him and his enormous moustache. But you might get lucky!

I am now back in Sydney and am partially recovered from my visit to Adelaide, other than a cough and the sniffles. I seem to get ill every time I go there these days! But at least this time I didn’t see a repeat of the Being Rushed to Hospital and Put on a Drip event of last Christmas. The place is deadly, I tell you!

Fortunately I felt up to spending some time at my bench over the weekend and completed a respectable batch of jewellery to send to two shops on consignment, along with a little bit of work for my Etsy shop and a mound of components to help see me through to Christmas.

When I’m doing that sort of making I find my mind always wanders - often to somewhere quite interesting.

On the weekend I kept thinking about the fact that at Adelaide airport while standing in a (ridiculously long) queue there was a woman in front of me who I’m almost positive was wearing one of my pieces of jewellery. It was a very simple sterling silver chain made up of round, hammer-beaten loops - exactly the same as a chain I used to make and sell a few years ago and it even featured the same sort of clasp.

The thing that particularly stood out about this chain - and made me wonder if it was one of mine - was the fact that even from half a metre away it looked handmade.

This is a more recent incarnation of the same sort of chain that the woman in Adelaide was wearing - it has bigger loops and a rougher finish. And it’s mine! I wear this piece of jewellery far more often than any other piece I own.

So as I worked on the weekend I started to ponder the nature of handmade objects - and the fact that more and more I like my work to look like it’s handmade rather than something perfect and polished.

Once upon a time perfection would have been the aim of every jewellery maker - just to be able to polish a piece of metal so that you could see your reflection in it must have been breathtakingly impressive, let alone to be able to form it into something useful or wearable - and seamlessly so.

These days it’s relatively trivial for mass manufacturers to make perfectly polished, seamless work - it’s just not that special anymore. Purchased lengths of chain, for instance, always look perfect - and they always look, to my eye at least, very much manufactured.

Anyone who’s done it will know that chain making by hand - of even the simplest chains - is a particularly laborious task. It’s a real labour of love. That alone makes a handmade chain very special to my mind.

I now embrace the idea that anyone who sees a chain that I’ve made can probably tell straight away that it’s been handmade - and this is now the case with a large amount of my jewellery. I used to try to avoid this and aimed for perfect finishes and invisible solder joins, but now for much (although not all) of my work I actually emphasise some of these ‘flaws’ and draw attention to the fact that I’ve handmade each piece.

These days you can see many of my solder joins, there are marks from my hammer (I love using my old and very much non-polished hammer for the marks it makes!), I often like to leave a roughly sanded finish, there might be the odd file mark, I handmake my ear wires without a jig and each one is very slightly different, etc..

I was wondering whether people who buy my work notice this - I even wondered if some might think I’m being slack!

Or perhaps there are those who really do enjoy it along the lines of the Japanese wabi sabi notion that imperfection is at the heart of beauty, something I really have consciously started to embrace more in my work in the last couple of years.

Of course wabi sabi is also about impermanence - I struggle a bit with that aspect, I confess - I want my objects to live on forever! And metal is a very permanent-seeming thing - until it’s melted down, of course.

So those were my weekend ponderings as I slaved away on my work!