I seem to get in a panic about Christmas earlier every year! But the reality is for many indie designers, the festive season is generally insanely busy and difficult to keep on top of. Early preparation is a must … but it can be hard to find the time to do it earlier in the year too when you’re running a micro business.

Yesterday I had my first ‘OMG it’s almost Christmas!’ moment of panic. This year part of the issue for me is having just taken on a major web project which will tie me up for much of the next six to eight weeks … and then suddenly it will be October and handmade jewellery sales are likely to already be picking up considerably and things probably won’t really slow down again until around March.

To try to ward off the panic I decided to make findings! I handmake most of the findings I use and always see making them as being a bit of a chore. It’s a major pain to run out of them – even more so during the busy season when there is so much else to worry about. Also making them in very small quantities is really inefficient so a chunk of time needs to be set aside to make a pile of the things.

And above is the outcome of my labour – fresh out of the tumbler this morning. It’s of course nowhere near enough to see me through to the end of the busy season, but it’s a start. I think I need to set a bit of time aside regularly to keep adding to my findings stash from here on in.

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!

Ever wondered what half a kilogram of sterling silver looks like? Well, okay, you probably haven’t. But now you know the answer!

This is actually just under half a kilogram (479g to be exact – or 1.05 US pounds). Each of the sheets is 0.5mm thick and approximately 65mm tall and wide (that would be 0.02″ thick and 2.6″ tall and wide).

And of course each one of them will be used in making my handmade jewellery – in fact, some have been already!

I use a great deal of 0.5mm sterling silver sheet as it’s my favourite thickness to work with, so I’m always running out of the stuff. So this year I thought I would buy a chunk of it in the hope that this will see me through much of the busy festive season without me needing to dash back to my suppliers too frequently, while hoping that they have enough stock on hand whenever I need it.

Anyone who works in precious metal of any type will be very well aware of what sort of pain I mean.  In the last 18 months or so the price of metals – especially precious metals – has skyrocketed.  Every time you think it can’t get any more expensive … it just does.

Currently I’m paying about AU$0.97 a gram for sterling silver – that’s around double what I’ve paid for it throughout most of my career (US$0.89 at today’s exchange rate).

Even worse, today I purchased some 18k gold for the first time in a very long time.  I remember the days where I used to gasp over it being around AU$9 a gram.  Today I paid AU$35 (around US$32).  Ouch!

And here is what AU$187 worth of gold looks like!  Yep, it looks pretty piddly – especially when you consider that it’s only 0.3mm thick (0.1″ or around the same as 30 gauge wire).

Of course everyone who knows a thing or two about precious metal prices is wishing that they’d stocked up on kilograms of the stuff a few years back!  Although some people will tell you that those reading this post a year or so in the future will most likely wonder why we didn’t buy it in bulk right now – many people think that the prices are going to get much higher again than they are already.

Ouch.  OUCH!!

Anyway, I just felt the need to have a little whine about that!  And buyers of jewellery and other precious metal objects should feel free to whine too as of course ultimately they are now paying more too.