A while back I answered some questions for an article by the lovely Angela of The Jewelry Report, a blog for jewellery makers. I really enjoyed answering the questions as many were specific to the process of making jewellery and written by someone who knows a thing or two about it.

The resulting article has an introduction to make me blush:

Australian jeweler, Simone Walsh, is an inspiration to all one-man-band jewelery designs. Not only does her jewelry reflect a sense of originality and dedicated to quality, but her success is a testament to her hard work and dedication to being a successful business woman. Yet every…single…piece is completely handmade. Here she gives us some insight into that productivity, and I really feel that this gal is someone that many aspiring jewelers, and established jewelers alike can (and should) look up to.

So if you’re interested in reading the rest of the article with the Q&A I completed you can find it right here on The Jewelry Report.

Sometimes it feels a tad depressing to be working in a field where the cost of your materials is down to the sometimes extreme whims of a market which has absolutely nothing to do with what you make.

At the moment both silver and gold are priced higher than they have been for a very long time. However, especially since the global economic crisis kicked off the price of gold has been going crazy as investors have been sinking their money into it, seeing it as a much safer bet than the stock market.

But as someone buying gold as a material to make jewellery with and not as an investment (or to make investment jewellery with), this is definitely unhelpful!

The photograph above is of a piece of 14ct gold (that’s 14kt for Americans) which is 0.5mm thick (0.02″) and 35mm tall and wide (1.4″). It set me back AU$245 (currently around US$200). Ouch!

Silver has also been going up and up for the past couple of years for all sorts of complex reasons. It is currently costing around double what it has done for most of my career. But to give an idea of how much more expensive gold is by comparison, 14ct gold is currently around 28 times more expensive per gram than sterling silver at trade cost.

Gold is a wonderful material to work with, but it does indeed hurt when a very small business like mine needs to purchase it.

As for what I’ll be making with my teensy little piece of gold … well I have a few ideas, but nothing concrete at this point. I have been using thinner gold as highlights in a few handmade jewellery pieces for a while now, but I would like to make some pieces where gold is more of a feature.

Stay tuned for details!

Yes, I am finally finished the big web-related job I’ve been working on since late last year, along with another small one.

And finally I can get back to jewellery making and all sorts of other things for myself – until a couple of other lurking web jobs come to fruition, anyway! There is also the possibility that I’ll be moving up to the Blue Mountains in the next little while, which is exciting.

But this weekend and early next week I plan to spend a lot of time at my bench catching up with making work and attending to a whole lot of neglected bits and pieces. And once I’m caught up I’m keen to get to work on some new handmade jewellery!

If you’re interested in what I’ve been working on, the smaller project was for an exhibition of contemporary jewellery called Luminaries, which was organised by the Jewellers & Metalsmiths Group in NSW and shown from 2006.

There are plenty of photographs of some wonderful work by some of the luminaries of Australasian contemporary jewellery.

The much larger project was for the Corporate Responsibility Index in Australia. This was a complete redesign and rebuild of a site that I first created years ago and which was badly out-dated.

Although the front end of the site isn’t particularly complex, the new site runs on a content management system, which is what made it a much larger job to set up. But the good news is that most updates to the site can now be handled by the Index staff.

Thanks to my lovely friend Dusty at 27 Things I’ve recently discovered that I can create a business page on Facebook for my handmade jewellery business.

So tonight I made one – you can find it right here.

If you’re a Facebook member you can sign up and be my fan!  Awwww.  And if you’re a Facebook member with your own business, I suggest you have a look into creating your own business page.

I confess that I’ve been a bit slow to set up an email list for my business, but it was one of the jobs I managed to complete when I redesigned my website recently. I plan to use this mailing list sparingly, but will let subscribers know about new work, subscriber specials and any major developments for my handmade jewellery shop and business in general.

You can sign up on the home page for my website at www.simonewalsh.com (the form is on the right-hand sidebar).

I’m using a professional service to manage the list, so your details will most definitely be kept private and of course you will be able to unsubscribe if you wish. And I promise not to be spammy!