I’m still not feeling fantastic, but I have been getting on with a lot of jewelry making work - most of which involves a lot of piercing (otherwise known as sawing, but piercing is such a great word!).I’m re-making a few production jewellery pieces that I’m behind with - butterfly wings, forget-me-nots, blossoms … and a batch of etching.

And here is a hurriedly taken photograph of where I’m up to thus far:

Plus I’m working on some pieces for a forthcoming exhibition, Takeaway which will be held at Gaffa Gallery in Sydney later this month and is a JMGA-NSW members’ show.

These pieces (I think I’ll make three) will all be neckpieces featuring sterling silver pendants. The pendants will be made up of two squares of curved silver, both of which have been cut out into an intricate European-style pattern. One side of each panel is blackened, while the other will be given a relatively high polish.

Having cut out a couple of these pieces I decided I’d also make some non-exhibition versions for my jewelry shop and selling through other outlets. These will feature a single panel of silver rather than two.

So I hope to have those up within a day or two with any luck.

By the way, I did make it to the opening of Expeditions on Thursday and was amazed by just how much work is in it - around 200 pieces, with an incredibly diverse selection of work and skills on display. I was also amazed by the turnout to the show - it was really packed inside and out and it was very difficult to see the work properly!I confess to feeling disappointed about the way my Istanbul box has been lit - ie. not well at all! This means that the highly detailed interior can hardly be seen. So, yes, disappointed, but I’m getting over it!

I seem to be having a bit of an off day today, so I will blog about a few pretty things I have gathered over the last day or so which might well cheer all of us up (if you need it, of course!).

Yesterday I was walking along not far from home, minding my own business and heading for a much-needed coffee when a delivery man with a box of flowers stopped me and asked, “Do you know where this street is?”. He showed me the card on the flowers and they were … for me!!! I giggled and showed him my driver’s licence to prove that I wasn’t just making it up and he thought it was pretty funny too! They are from St James Ethics Centre to thank me for my efforts in getting their interim new website up and running.

So I’ve taken a few photos of them as they’re gorgeous and are providing a bit of inspiration for some new pieces I hope to get made this weekend. To see more of the flower photos head over to the set of them on Flickr.

And today I went into the city to get some supplies as I realised last night that I didn’t have enough silver to get me through the rather mammouth amount of making I want to do before the middle of next week.

I also decided to drop into my favourite gemstone beads supplier as in the middle of the night a while back I had a vision of a new flower piece with a very particular type of bead in the centre - a light, powdery blue disc.

I’ve not been to the gemstone place in forever - mostly because I always spend far too much money there on things I know I’ll never use! However, they had exactly what I had in mind. The beads are turquoise, so they weren’t cheap, but it was a long strand and should see me through a lot of work. I also couldn’t help but pick up some matte dyed yellow jade (a lot less expensive!).

And I was also really excited to see that at the moment they have a really interesting collection of vintage glass beads - something they’d never normally carry as they specialise in precious and semi-precious stones. Apparently they bought a lot of them from a woman in the US who was retiring and who had originally bought these beads from a bead making company which closed down in the early ’70s.

So I grabbed several short strands of the ones I most liked - in blues, reds, yellows and greens. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can come up with in terms of how to use them in my work - I have several lurking ideas. As you can see my stash of beads now looks very multi-coloured! And I like seeing the pearls and garnets and lapis lazuli all mixed in with the glass too.

Anyway, I suspect I have a very long few days of making ahead of me now that I’m surrounded by beads, a lot of silver and a whole lot of designs. I hope to have some new work to share with you soon!

The lovely Brandy at Indie Obsession is having a great gift giveaway which you should race off to now and enter!

You might win one of my Japanese etch pendants with butterflies, as well as plenty of other wonderful indie goodies to make you happy!

Quick - go there now!!

The Etsy Metal street team has been fortunate enough to have another Etsy.com home page. Hooray for us!

The list features my Japanese etched pendant with butterflies.

By the way, if you’re someone who does (or might!) shop on Etsy, be aware that Etsy.com will be closed this weekend, 5-6 November 2006, presumably from early Saturday morning US time to early Monday morning. This is so that a new and very spiffy version of Etsy can be implemented and launched.

So if you want to buy some handmade things in a rush - including from my very own Etsy jewelry shop - you should do it now!

At around 5am this morning I finished uploading and fidding about with the new St James Ethics Centre website - well, the interim version of it. I’m sure there will still be a few teething problems to sort out as things get settled, but so far I’m very happy with it and very relieved to finally have made it this far.

It’s been a very big job indeed for just one person to get it to this point. The planning/scoping, site organisation/navigation, visual design, CSS and XHTML coding, content editing, content writing, search engine optimisation, etc. has all entirely been done by your’s truly. Although there has been lots of input along the way from the programmer who now needs to complete the rest of the project - which includes lots of rather spiffy functionality that the two of us have been working out for much of this year - forums, blogs, a wiki, RSS feeds, a full user accounts system and much more.

In a fit of complete exhaustion and ‘over-it-ness’ I have decided to take a few days away from work and this project. Instead I plan to finally catch up with jewellery-related things. I have a lot of making to be doing - and more besides. So I should have some pretty things to share soon enough!

There are other interesting things going on too.

Tomorrow night I plan to go to the opening of the Expeditions exhibition in which my Istanbul box is showing. So I will actually be out and being social, which will be odd!

Although I also did a little bit of socialising in Adelaide over the weekend - yes, I was in Adelaide *again*. This time for a meeting of a small group of people representing contemporary jewellers and metalsmiths from around Australia to discuss the way forward for creating a national body. It was an amazingly productive meeting and instead of getting bogged down in complications we actually resolved a lot of stuff and finished early! It seems the focus for the national group will be a website, which I think is a fantastic idea and which I hope to be involved with if I have the capacity. But more about that later.

I’ve also just got around to reading a flier that someone at the meeting in Adelaide gave me. It’s for some gold and silversmithing masterclasses being held at the Australian National University in Canberra in early January. One is purely silversmithing - forging, alloying, ingot preparation, finishing processes and more. I’ve never done much in the way of real smithing before and I’m very keen. Even despite the fact that I’d need to spend five days in Canberra!

Plus there’s another exhibition looming that I must make three pieces for (seeing as that’s what I’ve said I’ll put in!). This one is run by JMGA-NSW. The exhibition, Takeaway, will be showing at Gaffa Gallery in Surry Hills, Sydney later in the month. It’s a pre-Christmas selling exhibition, the idea being that when you buy the work you take it with you in a little cardboard takeaway container - and your purchase is replaced by a polaroid image of it. More about that when I’ve got something to show you!

And in personal news, a legal matter I’ve had floating around for a little while to do with a car accident I was injured in (as a passenger) several years ago has suddenly been resolved much more quickly and positively than I’d ever expected. This means that some money is heading my way and that’s going to make life easier and may even allow me to invest in some tools I need, amongst other things. Although of course it doesn’t make my rather persistent neck/headaches go away! But it will help me feel less grouchy about that.

So … consider yourselves updated! And I promise I will write more interesting things soon.