I pretty much have no life at the best of times. But at this time of year I really have no life at all. My existence pretty much entirely involves working, sleeping a bit, working some more, eating hurried meals, working again, etc..

Funnily enough, I realise that I could probably get more done more efficiently if I worked less. But because I work too much I have to keep working too much because I’m less efficient than I should be because I work too much. I’m sure that makes perfect sense!

Anyway, I thought I would share the above photograph with you after a few days of hard work to catch up on handmade jewelry stock for Christmas. I did actually get a bit more done than this, but some was put away already and other pieces had already been sent to customers.

And now … back to the grindstone!

Over the weekend I once again spent lots and lots of time at my work bench, a fair bit of which was pinning down and completing some new designs - but as usual I spent some time catching up on making existing pieces as well.

New and existing partially complete jewellery components.

… And today I’ve spent a chunk of time taking a whopping 370 photographs of completed new work.

I now need to sift through the images and delete those which are clearly no good. And then it’s a matter of opening them all up in Photoshop in batches, choosing the best variations for each piece and editing them ready for listing, before finally calculating pricing for the pieces and writing descriptions. Once all that is done, finally I can list them.

Which goes to show that creating new work is about a lot more than just creating new work!

Once I’ve edited the images I’ll post some of them here to give you a better sneak peak of what’s about to be listed in my jewellery shop.

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!

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.

Don’t forget that any reader of this very blog can get a 15% discount in my new jewelry shop - but only for a couple more days.

The code to use when checking out is: makeme. The discount will end on 10 October.

You can learn more about the launch of the shop right here.