And neglecting almost everything jewellery-related, unfortunately – although I have managed to catch up with things a little bit today.

What has been devouring my life over the last little while (and for much of this year, to be honest!) has been a very major web upgrade project I’ve been undertaking for St James Ethics Centre (which, despite its name, is not a religious organisation – although it is a non-profit).

Currently I’m working around the clock to get an interim version of the new site ready to go live – hopefully by the end of this week.

The interim website will feature none of the (rather amazingly good!) functionality that is to come – new forums, blogs, a wiki, a proper user accounts system and much more – but it will feature the new visual design and site organisation. And it will allow me to get back to doing my regular work (and hours!) while my friend the programmer (Hi Colin!) gets on with his part of the slaving away.

The interim version of the site upgrade was supposed to be a quick thing to do as the rest of the project has taken much longer than we’d hoped (as is always the way with these things!), however, even this has proven to be a very time-consuming task.

So I’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks wading through hundreds of pages to ensure the new formatting is correct, fixing any errors, doing some editing of content and writing new content.

I’m exhausted! And I’m very much missing my workbench and tools. However I do hope to get back to them soon.

But until then the only handmade thing I have to share with you is a very sneak preview of the new site design. Note that very few – if any – of the links will work at this point – and that in a week or so this interim link will most likely no longer function!

You can visit the creakingly old version of the website for a comparison (which I also designed and built, but several years ago when the organisation had a vastly smaller site and when web standards were only talked about by people who insisted that all links should be in blue and underlined … and we hate those people).

Edit: I’ve changed the links in this post as the new site is now live!

I went into the Etsy Treasury for a quick poke around this evening, with the intention of soon after knuckling down to work.

But there was this empty list looking pleadingly at me. Normally they get snapped up so quickly and I thought that if I just ignored it then it would surely just disappear.

But no … and I found I could not resist its charms!

So I now have a shiny new Treasury list called Silver which will be in existence for the next 48 hours. It’s a collection of work by members from the lovely Etsy Metal street team, of which I am also a member.

Go there now to click and comment!

I was recently rather chuffed to discover that Di Overton had featured some of my handmade jewellery along with some lovely feedback on her great design blog, Designers’ Block.

Di is the former owner of wheredidyoubuythat.com and is also a guest blogger on the wonderful ThisNext.com, which is also highly recommended if you’ve not been there yet.

Yes, it’s finally on its way to the exhibition venue after much hard work. Since I last wrote about the piece I think I’ve entirely redone the finish about three times. And finally the last time was successful enough that I could coax myself to leave it alone.

The difficulty was in trying to leave the exterior with a dull, muted and worn-looking finish, while making the interior bright and shiny – which was made all the more difficult by the fact that the only openings for the box are through the small cut out windows, which don’t exactly facilitate doing any work with hand tools or even my fingers!

However, with the aid of much glad wrap, electrical tape, my trusty homemade tumbler (thanks Dad!) and a bucketload of patience, it was finally done. And today it was packed up and posted off to Metalab in Surry Hills, Sydney – after a few final photographs to try to capture the end result.

There’s no absolute guarantee that my piece will be included in the show at this point, but I’m fairly hopeful it will be.

If you’re in Sydney, the show – Expeditions – opens on the evening of 2 November 2006 (6-8pm) at Metalab, 10b Fitzroy Place, Surry Hills. It closes on 25 November, with Metalab being open from 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Saturday. You can also attend a ‘high tea’ on 4 November.

I put my Christmas pudding coins/tokens/charms up in my Etsy shop yesterday and thought I’d post here to let people know. So now you can go Christmas pudding coin shopping!

If you’ve been paying attention (as I’m sure you have!), you will know that I’ve been working towards creating sets of pure silver Christmas pudding tokens – and finally I’m ready to go. I plan to put the tokens into my Etsy shop tomorrow.

If you’re not familiar with Christmas pudding coins (because you’ve not been paying attention afterall!), the idea is that they are mixed into a traditional plum pudding (yes, the pudding that actually has no plums in it) and whoever finds one or more in their piece of pudding on Christmas Day has good luck for the forthcoming year. You can learn more about Christmas puddings, coins, charms and other such traditions right here.

The tradition has been increasingly difficult to keep alive since silver ceased being used for coins and the base metals now used were deemed unsafe to cook with. So I’ve decided to create my own tokens to make up for this!

My own take on this tradition has been to create sets of six pure silver tokens, each of which has been etched with a vintage Christmas illustration.

The sets will be selling in my shop on Etsy for US$65.00. They include six pure silver pudding tokens, along with recipes for my family’s traditional Christmas pudding and very delicious brandy sauce.

Below are photos of the the packaging I’m planning to use (the cherries fabric wrapping is for buyers in Australia). You can see more photos of the set on Flickr.