Rose pendant

Most of the making work I do for my business is what I’d term ‘production work’ – creating items which are not one-off designs and which are intended to sell and be worn by my customers.

Back when I was a student I used to see production work as a necessary evil – or at least a necessary not-so-interesting thing to do. My intention was always for my production work to help fund my other ‘more interesting’ work. It was a way to bring in some income by doing what I love, even though the work itself I didn’t think was as engaging as the one-off jewellery and object artworks I created which were far less likely to find a market and were much more about exploring ideas.

But things have changed, particularly in the last couple of years. I’ve come to realise that I now really love the process of creating production pieces to sell in my jewellery shop and elsewhere – both re-making designs, along with the process of developing with new designs which are intended to sell.

I think in part this is to do with coming to even more fully appreciate the actual process of making jewellery at least as much as completing something that I feel pleased with.

I’ve written before about how in recent years I’ve started to particularly love the process of saw-piercing metal, which is just one example of the fact that I now find a great deal of enjoyment in undertaking and perfecting these sorts of processes, even when it comes to creating the same design or components over and over – although of course in the world of the handmade, no piece is ever really identical to another.

Additionally I’m also developing even more of an appreciation of the materials that I work with, of course this means silver in particular, but I’m keen to expand into using other materials more regularly as part of my production work.

There is also a challenge in creating pieces which are mostly intended to be worn as every day items and which aren’t too complex to re-create, particularly given that selling online means that pieces need to fairly closely resemble those I’ve photographed previously. This sets up a particular set of design issues to resolve for each new idea I develop. And of course I have to actually like the designs myself, which adds another dimension to the process!

These days I rarely have the time to devote to one-off conceptual pieces for exhibitions – or even just for my own benefit as I explore an idea. I do definitely miss being able to do this as much as I would like to, but at this stage that’s outweighed by my newly discovered love of the process of making and developing production work.

I’m sure this is all helped by the fact that I’m now able to spend a chunk of my working life doing something that I love and also that this work is now a very major part of me making ends meet. That’s definitely something to be happy about!

But of course there are times when production work can be a bit more of a trial. I often find this to be the case after I’ve come up with a new series of pieces to put into production. I’ll finish the design process with one of each new piece made and lurking in my mind is the thought that I’ve completed the process … and isn’t that great! Except of course that’s just the start.

Each piece needs to have numerous photographs taken of it – which always takes longer and is harder work than expected – which all then need to be organised and edited. Each piece needs to be priced properly, which can sometimes be an agonising process. Then descriptions need to be written and the pieces need to be listed in various online outlets. All of this takes a considerable amount of time.

And then straight away the process of production work needs to start all over again – I need to make multiples for my own stocks and I generally need to make more for any bricks and mortar outlets I think the pieces are suited to. This means that I often need to make quite a number of a particular design at this stage, which does sometimes get a bit frustrating and exhausting, especially when – as in the pieces photographed above – the pieces all require very similar components to be made repeatedly in order to complete them.

On the day I took the image above I would have been happy to never need to make one of these little cup shapes again! Each one needed to be punched out of metal, beaten with different hammers to build up the right texture, annealed, drilled, domed and then the edges needed to be softened – and that’s before any of them were put together to form an actual piece of jewellery.

But I’ve recovered from that now and have been enjoying the process of re-making those same pieces as required – just not in the same quantity all at once!