silver wire and gemstone jewellery in development by Gayle Bird
I hit the flea market & value village a couple of weeks ago. What a jackpot! Got a pile of watches for Laird to pull apart for me, some vintage and new earrings and chain, some metal bracelets I’ll use as the base for some steampunk pendants, and a little surprise….
… Belt Buckles! Not sure if it’s going to work but I plan to wire some clock parts and vintage bits to these and see if we can make some nifty jewellery!
The other day I finally completed the pile of waiting earrings on the workbench. For some reason they were completely blocking me! I normally work in batches of 100 at a time but these 2 dozen just wouldn’t finish themselves.
But I got ‘em all done and reached out for the earwires – to discover only a couple of stray ones at the bottom of a drawer.
Disaster!
I immediately ordered some online, but that takes weeks. I thought about leaving them until the hooks got here and simply working on a different part of the bench, but just couldn’t bear to leave these half-finished earrings on the bench for one more day, staring at me. So, I dug through drawers and boxes and baggies and managed to scrounge up just enough fishhook earwires to match up with what I needed. A sigh of relief – until I realized these were way too long for the tiny little earrings I’d made and they threw off the balance of the design.
Now what? Desperate to just make this pile go away, I grabbed my fattest bailmaking pliers and did a test to see if by making the hook fatter, they’d end up shorter… and it worked! Better yet, I like them way better than the basic fishhook earwires! I think they’re much more elegant and make them stand out.
It’s more work, but I’m so going to do this to all of my earwires from now on. It just goes to show that a pain in the arse can be turned into something kind of special.
I saw a lot of these digital watch components on Etsy and I HAD to have them. Being such a computer geek, I’ve always wanted to figure out some way to incorporate circuitry into my jewellery, but computer parts are always so clunky. But these seemed like they might do the trick… and when they arrived they were soooo much better than I had imagined! They’re *perfect* jewellery-sized pieces of circuitry, ready-made and all completely different! Bliss. I came home from work, opened the package and was so excited I quickly scarfed down some peanut butter sammiches standing over the sink, and went straight to the studio without even changing into comfy clothes.
These are the first five. There are about 20 more in various stages of completion. I feel brilliant.
My mommy got this one for her birfday present!
A preview of the early stages of some of these… many more in development.
An unexpected burst of energy after supper resulted in 3 new pieces for today!
The buttons have been laid out in these colour combinations on the workbench for at least a couple of weeks but I just couldn’t make it work in my head. I added the inverted washers, which was better, but it still wasn’t right…. until I opened a drawer and saw the vintage skeleton keys a locksmith friend had dug out of some tubs of random bits on his garage this past summer and realized they’d be *perfect* bases for what I had in mind.
The keys are fairly hidden behind the buttons but you can mostly see the ends poking out, plus it’s really great just to know they’re in there!
Here they are all together so you can see the necklace part:
The orange-ish one has a massive inverted washer in the middle underneath that fabulous terracotta-coloured button. It was exciting to find that they fit together so well! This one also features 3 connected vintage leather flowers that were in a box of my grandmother’s broken jewellery bits.
I had actually tried with the blue combination last week but felt it was flimsy and didn’t care for it. My success with the keys had me adding a few reinforcement wraps here and there which tightened it up considerably and helped me feel like it was more complete!
I just really loved this purple button. And those inverted washers give me joy!
A dozen or so heart pendants in blood red, sunset orange, and sweetheart pink, plus one special hammered pendant in extra-large. These will be available at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft & Design later this week!
My future mother-in-law’s mother passed away a couple of months ago and left behind a large clock. Laird took apart her clock to harvest the parts and I wrapped them into pendant/brooches for his mom. She wrote a poem and I packaged them up and she gave them to her siblings as a memento of their mother.
It was a really beautiful gesture, and I wish we’d had the new camera to take these photos with back then!
I just love Christmas. People who see me in November probably think I’m a grinch but I just hate EARLY Christmas. It shouldn’t be months-long. But I love it when it’s here! In my family, my brother’s birthday is a week before The Big Day. We usually try to keep them separate – so I don’t get into the mood until about 6 days before. Which is NOW! I had a GREAT weekend – we got a tree, we got some Christmas Meat, had a great time out with Laird, and the neighbours’ house (which I can see from my kitchen window) looks like this:
Yesterday I made my customary Christmas chocolates – only this year they weren’t customary at all; I actually managed to temper chocolate this year and so I’m way beyond my basic bark. Plus, I made a huge batch of ganache and used it to create a pile of centers which I then dipped in various ways.
For those who don’t know, this is ganache:
It’s belgian chocolate melted into heavy cream. This is what’s inside truffles. It’s like the inside of a Lindt chocolate… only better. I kind of made way too much so had to come up with ways to use it. For instance:
This is a layer of ganache with a layer of skor and peanut butter bits, coated on one side with tempered dark chocolate and on the other with melted milk wafers.
This one is a layer of ganache, with a layer of melted mint chocolate chips, topped with green chocolate wafers and milk wafers on the other side.
Here we’ve got ganache bottomed with melted peanut butter chips and coated in cocoa powder to keep the ganache from being sticky.
And these? These are the ugliest, most insanely delicious caramels you will ever see, taste, or even hear about. It’s a layer of ganache, a layer of caramel lightly salted with kosher salt, topped and bottomed with milk chocolate wafers. When I cut them they exploded so I had to dip the bottom 3/4 of them in more chocolate to hold it all together… so essentially they’re double-dipped. Holy crap. They’re so good.
On the right above is a layer of ganache embedded with pretzels and skor bits, double-sided with white chocolate. Top left are more caramels.
CARNAGE.
This is the box of edges.. the “ugly” chocolates. I’ll be taking these to work :)
Nom.
A dozen new items up in the shop today! Wow, I would have thought it was a lot more than a dozen, I feel like I’ve been doing this all day.
I hope to have more common colours up next week… I’m still working on a more affordable shipping option.
It’s been crazy-go-nuts around here for a while now, with the Christmas Loft craft show looming very closely ahead and all. Hope to see you there if you’re local!
Also, the Etsy shop will be closing down for a few days during the show (Nov 25-28 at least) so I can bring as much inventory as possible with me…. so if you’ve got your eye on something, I suggest you snap it up, because it might sell at the craft fair! The good news is, lots of new things will be up in the shop shortly afterward, and every week all winter as well!
Another quick update… these are the clay nautilus shells I made with watch parts embedded. Kinda cool, but a little clunky to wrap. I like the circles better (more photos later)…
I’m pre-loading a large jewellery display even as I make items, which was dumb because I forgot to photograph them individually first, but smart because it’s saved me at least an hour of setup on show day. What this means for you is, only group shots for the rest of the week.
This came out of NOWHERE. I realized early this afternoon that I was finished all of the work I’d put out for myself for this show. Now what?! I looked around aimlessly for a little while and decided to take my older pieces and start marking them down for the sale box. In the middle of the pile was a single bracelet, an old design I haven’t tried for years.
I tossed aside the older work and started working on bracelets!
I tried two in the old style but really didn’t care for how they were working out, so I tried something new – a 4-strand braid.
I’ve had the 4-strand braid on my mind for a while as the next possible tutorial – it’s really useful for wrapping large, flat stones such as agate slices – but it suddenly occurred to me that it might work really well as the basis for a bracelet, especially if I hammered it. The first couple were a little wobbly but I got into the groove pretty quickly and voila! Lovin’ it!
What do you think?
…and counting.
Only time for a couple of quick updates this week… I took a peek at the calendar and apparently the show is in a week and a half! After my heart started back up again, I realized that I’m actually more than prepared for this… dozens of earrings, rings, beach glass and coal pendants, lots of steampunk (although they keep selling on Etsy, I still have a few dozen left), a bit of polymer clay/steampunk, some great gemstone cabochons, a few little surprises, and my big box of clearance items. That was sort of a mental inventory for my own benefit, but I figure you might like to know too :)
Beach glass, or sea glass, is one of the prettiest pieces of garbage you’ll ever see. I am lucky to live on Cape Breton Island in the Atlantic Ocean and I’m able to collect my own beach glass. If you aren’t so lucky, you can buy them on Ebay. This technique also works for any flat, irregular object.
This is my first tutorial & it’s super duper long, because I had trouble taking out any steps. If it’s any help, I shot a video, too! I thought it would help explain the photos by watching me create something start to finish. Also, it was hard to get the photos while also working with both hands. So you get both!
Much more detail in the many, many photos! Click More to see :) Continue reading ‘How to Wire-Wrap Beach Glass the Easy Way’
Pretty pretty watch-part pendants with some vintage earring bits as well. Nothing but picture porn today!
A book of art nouveau designs caught my eye as I was passing the bookshelf in my downstairs hallway on the way to the studio so I grabbed it and brought it down with me. Flipping through was pretty inspiring so I grabbed a heavy-gauge wire and my hammer! There’s minimal bling on this one because the design itself should be the focus. I used a bit of grosgrain ribbon for the rest of the necklace.
Lookit how pretty!
This piece is available in my new Etsy store, too :D
I am SO freaking excited to be able to tell you that my online shop is now OPEN at Etsy. Just a dozen or so pieces up for starters but I’ve already sold a piece, which is exhilarating despite having sold thousands of other pieces in galleries and shows because this is my first ever online sale.
Wanna see? Of course you do. Here are the first items I’ve ever made available for sale online.
| Etsy gaylebird |
What would you like to see most in the shop?
I was given the honour of creating a wedding necklace for my friend Stephanie. She had a fall-coloured wedding and fell in love with the honey-coloured beach glass I’d had in my stash. It went beautifully with the carnelian and pearls she’d already chosen. We had a lovely evening together sorting out what style and size and shape she’d like best. She was exceptionally easy to please :)
I took a few in-progress shots as I went along, maybe you’ll be interested?
She was a beaming, gorgeous bride and I was proud to have taken a tiny, shiny part in that.
I’ve been itching to get back into polymer clay for quite some time, and this past week I finally pulled it out and had the most fun with it! I had all these teeny tiny watch parts from when Laird tore apart a bunch of watches for me and there were just so many that I really couldn’t use… they’re so small they either can’t be attached or they get lost within the design. So I’ve been collecting them in little watchmaker’s cases for a while now.
However, they’re perfect for pushing into clay! I wasn’t sure what kind of shape to make – I knew I wanted to create some kind of animal look like it had been made out of metal in Victorian times but it took a while to hit on the nautilus/snail shape. They were super fun to work on.
I made a bunch and then tried some hearts, which worked out OK but Laird pointed out that they were taking me forever to make, so I thought for a few minutes and figured out that the watchmaker’s cases made perfect circular cutters, so I made a bunch of those quickly to try and even out the time I’d spent on the more sculptural pieces :)
I varnished them after baking and will wrap them after. So there’s more to come!
After I made the hair clips last week, I had more time in my day so I looked around for something else to do that was different and new, and my eyes lit upon a package of fancy fibre-y yarn/ribbon thingums. I thought the little feathery bits would be a fun accent into a wire piece, but what else could I put in there? And it hit me: actual feathers! I dug out some dyed craft feathers I had and also a few bits of reclaimed leather, and went to town.
Simple and Fun! I think the bright colours will look fab in my booth at the Christmas Loft craft show this year.
I teased you with 3 new products last week and only just now have managed to get photos taken. And actually I only got photos of 2 of the 3 so you’ll still have to wait for the third one. That’s not me teasing you on purpose, that’s just me being stupidly busy.
I was making these up as I went along.
First, teeny little hair clips:
(Yep that’s me. Thankfully my ears were clean!)
Here’s how they operate (please ignore the skin falling off my fingers, it does that). Open:
And closed:
They clip pretty tight and there’s a little plastic/rubber strip in there that keeps them from getting stuck in your hair or damaging it. I love these little guys!
You know what, that’s enough for one post. I’ve got some work to do so I’ll post the others tomorrow.
One of a kind wire-wrapped jewellery handmade by Cape Breton artist Gayle Bird. Look for silver wire, labradorite, beach glass, gemstones, glass, beads, and a unique style.
Find Me On Facebook!