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.

I spent some time at my bench this weekend making some jewellery for one of my consignment outlets along with for my own stocks. And the results of my labour all needed to be tumbled in steel shot to become bright and shiny.

A batch of handmade jewellery fresh from my new tumbler.

Recently I purchased a sparkly new Lorotone tumbler to replace the wonderful but now old and slightly decrepit tumbler my Dad made for me years ago using bits from his shed).

It’s taking me a while to get used to the ways of my new tumbler. Because I’d used my old (and rather eccentric!) one for such a long time I knew exactly how much shot, water and tumbling compound it needed and exactly how long my work needed to be tumbled to get the result I wanted.

Of course my new tumbler is different and it will take me some experimenting to get those things right.

It’s been making me think about how very familiar we all become with the tools and equipment we use extensively. Changing those things can be a bit disorientating at times. But of course change can be a good thing!

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!

Finally last weekend (which was a long one in Australia) I was able to get back to my jewellery bench, now set up in the studio space in my new home.

I spent the weekend completing an order for the National Portrait Gallery shop in Canberra, along with making some urgently needed jewellery for my own supplies seeing as I’ve been badly running out of the jewellery in my shops.

Above are just a few of the little silver blossoms I cut out in sterling silver on the weekend. Each of them were then soaked to remove the paper (with the shape drawn on it), sanded, filed, tumbled and then finally turned into finished jewellery which was then tumbled again.

I seem to spend half of my life making these little blossoms as they form some of the most popular jewellery pieces I sell, so it was no surprise to spend my first weekend of making since moving doing yet more of them!

As for how my new studio is working out, well so far so good! The space is almost fully set up, but there are a few loose ends to tidy up.

The only issue I found on the weekend was that the three large windows let in so much light (in spite of the room being painted so dark) that heating or soldering metal can be difficult because I can’t see what I’m doing! All I need to do is remember to pull a blind or two down before I start and it’s fine, however.

This is not going to be set up as my ‘dream studio’ seeing as I’m still renting and things like fume extraction, heavy equipment which should be bolted to the floor or heavy furniture, etc. are currently out of the question. But soon enough I hope to be working towards just that!

This is a quick blog post to let people know that I’m still alive! Phew.

I’m working hard on pulling myself together after a very difficult end to 2007 and start to 2008 in terms of my health and ending up in a bit of a mess.

Unfortunately ‘working hard’ actually means taking a large number of things very slowly, something I’ve been finding frustrating as it’s so unlike me. However I’m coming to accept that is the way things need to be just now.

I’m also pulling back on a number of commitments – at least temporarily – having realised that I really do need to put my health ahead of all sorts of things just now, no matter how interesting those things might be.

However, I’ve still got some exciting plans for my business this year which I hope to be able to bring about – but they will happen more slowly than I would have liked and after a big reorganisation of the other things on my plate.

I’ve also got lots of ideas for new work which I’m hoping to start to deveop very soon. Thankfully making jewellery is going ahead at the usual pace!

As for blogging … I hope to be back to doing more of it very soon.

Just call me Gloria Gaynor!

I spent much of my weekend sawing out pieces of sterling silver, some of them into very intricate designs. While working I thought about the process of saw piercing and how much my own perception of it has changed over the past year or so.

Finished handmade jewelry and components fresh from the tumbler after a weekend of making.

I suspect it’s no accident that many courses teaching jewellery making from a metalworking perspective often have beginners start out by learning to saw shapes out of sheets of metal.

Of course many pieces of jewellery require saw piercing as the first step in making them, but I think more importantly saw piercing requires seemingly boundless amounts of patience, especially when starting out. And if there’s one thing that jewellery makers need to have in buckets it’s patience, along with a healthy dose of perseverance.

A day’s worth of broken saw blades. Thanks to Shoshona Snow for this gorgeous little dish!

Saw blades used in a jeweller’s saw frame are incredibly fine. Even if beginners are started out on what more experienced makers would regard as thick blades, they are still much finer than most people will ever have used before. Also, sawing out shapes for jewellery very often requires the maker to saw out intricate and fluid designs with complex curves and sudden changes of direction.

Left: A 5/0 saw blade against my hand to give an idea of thickness (or lack thereof!). You can see a close up showing the tiny teeth of the blade on Flickr. Right: Sterling silver scrap caught by the pouch in my bench after a few days of saw piercing and other jewelry making work.

The result is broken saw blades – lots and lots (and lots!) of broken saw blades.

Of course beginners will break blades a lot more frequently than more experienced jewellery makers, but it’s something that still happens often no matter how much experience you have. As a beginner you will either learn to live with this and keep going or you will decide this world of jewellery making isn’t for you and will find another outlet for your creativity. And realising this sooner rather than later is always a good thing!

Obviously as a beginner I stuck with it, despite the large mounds of broken saw blades and the frustration of seemingly endlessly replacing them as I was learning. Patience is definitely one of my personal strong (and weak!) points, so jewellery making and me seem like a good fit.

However, I still didn’t exactly love the technique of sawing metal. It was something I had to do as part of making many designs, but I was never exactly fond of this aspect of my work and would avoid doing it when I could.

Then I read one little line in a technical book which changed my perception of saw piercing. It was simply that a saw blade is effectively like a tiny sliver of the cross-section of a file and that to a degree you are kind of filing metal when you are sawing. This led me to go off on a tangent and suddenly see saw piercing as being a little bit like carving – and I love the process of carving! I find it easy to get into ‘the zone’ with this sort of work and for me it’s a very fluid, organic process, which I very much enjoy.

So this simple change in perception completely turned my thinking about saw piercing on its head. Pretty much immediately I started to work on much more intricate pieces where the technique is really the focus of the finished jewellery. And of course my skill in this area of work continues to improve as I push myself.

Sterling silver butterfly pendant.

One example of this in my current handmade jewellery range is the butterfly pendant I have been making in recent months – an extension of the butterfly wing pendant I have been making for a year or so now.

I now also often prefer to leave evidence of the saw piercing process in many of my pieces. For example, the marks from the saw blade can be seen in the pierced out sections of the butterfly wings. I like my work to look handmade and I love to leave traces of the process of making in my jewellery, and this is one example of doing so.

So as a result of one sentence in a book, for me saw piercing now really is a joy instead of a chore.

Except of course when I’m having one of those off days where I seem to break about ten times more saw blades than seems reasonable and even my patience is worn very thin! In which case it’s a good idea to simply do something else.