Flattening wire

It's easy enough to buy square or half round wire in precious metals but it's harder to find anything other than round wire in other metals.

The obvious solution to this problem is buying a rolling mill, or square drawing plates, but since they're expensive, I was thinking of alternatives I could use. In the past, for smaller pieces, I've hammered the metal but got an irregular result.

I thought about my Sizzix but you'd have to keep opening and closing the sandwich and I'm not sure it would work.

When I finally thought about the obvious solution I felt really stupid for not considering it before: I have a pasta machine!

In the picture you can see, from left to right, round 0,8 mm wire and next to it is the flattened version after going through the pasta machine on one of it's thinnest settings (I think it was setting 8). Next to that is a 1 mm round aluminium wire and finally the flat version of the same on the thinnest setting. It makes a great flat wire for braiding or wrapping.

I'm sure a lot of people have thought of this before since it seems so obvious but I decided to make a post just in case in can help anyone else.

Greeting cards for earrings

When you make handcrafted jewelry there's a certain amount of paper crafts involved in the process: you need labels, business cards, earring and necklace cards, background papers for photographing your jewelry (paper is much better than fabric as a background because it doesn't collect dust, animal hairs or fluff can will look bad on a blown up image), thank you notes, etc. Some people do everything on the computer (or have it done for them) and print it out, others like to use stamps, pattern paper and several handmade techniques to personalize their labels and cards. I use a mix of both. I created my logo and made the base layouts for my labels and cards but then I use pattern or colored paper as a background.

My point is that I had already accumulated a certain amount of paper and materials and since I like paper crafts, I had fun this summer making some greeting cards.
It was so much fun, in fact, that I felt I needed to come up with a decent excuse to be able to keep making cards. I came up with an interesting idea that seemed absolutely obvious to me. I looked around on the internet thinking that it was so obvious that someone must have done it first and maybe it would save me time to see how other people had solved some of the technical aspects. I did find some earring greeting cards but they all featured the earrings on the front of the card. It's a perfectly fine idea but I wanted the earrings on the inside so that they're protected by the card itself and also to make them a surprise.

In the end this is what I came up with:

The outside is a typical 5" square greeting card but it you can flip it inside out and display the earrings instead.

The butterfly digi stamp comes from Shery K Designs. She has truly wonderful free digi stamps but beware that her blog is extremely slow and it's quite a nightmare to be able to actually download anything (too many things have to load in each page before you're able to even scroll down or click on anything).

I colored the stamp with watercolor pencils and used a decorated glitter design cardstock for the background.

Inside I used the same background paper and frame but left the center blank for the earrings. I made a little folded tab to hang the earrings that I glued onto the white cardstock.

The cardstock layers make the card pretty sturdy so the weight of the earrings isn't a problem.

I'm pretty happy with the result and now I can make all sorts of variations. The frame can be square, round, oval, etc, and I can't wait to try out different styles.

I may have to make a custom envelope, though, because of the card's thickness.

Alternative beading needles

I'm not a great beader since I work mainly with wire and polymer clay, but once in a while I will incorporate cord into my designs. Since the end of the cord tends to fray and open up, I like using a large eye beading needle to thead the beads into the cord.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find good beading needles in the area where I live, and if I need to order them online at a time when I don't need to buy any other materials, I end up paying more for shipping than I do for the needles.

In a pinch I tend to make my own needles out of thin wire. It's simple enough and it works great so long as the bead is not too tiny: Cut a piece of wire, fold in two, twist the two ends together leaving a loop to thread the wire and you're ready to go.

The downside is that, since you have two ends entering the bead, one of them sometimes bends back and you can spend more time readjusting the needle than you do threading beads.

The other problem is that if the beads are too small, the presure caused by the folded cord entering the bead can be too much for the thin wire and it will break but if you don't have many beads to thread it works fine.

 Recently, however, I've found another alternative beading needle that I really like.

About a year ago, I woke up one morning to find I had a new canine tooth popping out. Considering that I was 38 this seemed odd. My dentist denied my suspicions of possibly turning into a vampire (a troubling thought since I tend to pass out at the sight of blood) and told me that my current canine was in fact still a milk tooth and the new one had finally decided to emerge (better late than ever, I guess).

The result was that I had to get braces to help the new tooth along (missing a tooth at this age is neither cute nor very sexy, I can tell you that much) and this led to my discovery.

Braces make it very hard to floss, so my sister-in-law recommended a thing called floss-threaders. They're basically thin plastic needles to help you thread the floss in between the brace wires. As soon as I saw them I thought "these would be great for beading!" and they are.

These are called "Eez-thu", I can buy them at the drugstore and they come in packs of 25. They solve the two wire end problem, are very thin so they can even go though small seed beads and are actually quite strong.

The eye is really large so threading the wire is a breeze and they're not even that expensive - they end up costing about 15 cents each. Plus, if you know someone who wears braces you can always share the cost and just keep a couple for yourself :)

I'm not saying they're better than metal needles but they certainly work for me, and best of all, they're easy to find.

Nutter button

So my brother and my husband made a really cool game called Nut Factory for iphone and ipad. They spent a year of late nights and weekends working on it and I'm still surprised at how great it turned out considering it was just the two of them.

I wanted to help promote the game because the hard part with these things is getting people to realize such a game even exists. Being jewelry inclined, I decided to made a funny button to help take the message to the streets.

I made the button in dark blue polymer clay and stamped the message on it before painting it with white acrylic paint and wiping away the excess to highlight the letters and give it a textured look. For something so simple I think it turned out pretty cool.

I textured the back using a netting mesh and used a thin square to attach the pin.

And here's how it looks on a real person:

I you want to know what the Nut Factory game is all about, you can visit the blog or the Facebook page.

Keep cutting!

New Locket Pendants

The photo locket pendant seems to have been a popular idea so I'm posting two other examples.
The first is actually just a small photo frame and not a pendant. It was made for a couple's 60th wedding anniversary.

The base color is silver and the texture was highlighted with gold and burnt umber paint. The gold gives it a very ornate and old-fashioned look but I thought it was appropriate for an older couple.
This time I used ribbon to join the two parts and an amethyst on the cover. I think it looked better with just the silver but it's still an interesting color detail.
The back has a heart with the number 60 stamped on it, as a reference to the wedding anniversary.

The inside has pictures of the couple taken on their wedding day. The picture of the groom gave me some trouble because his skin was so dark and I couldn't get a good contrast to make the features pop. After three tries I finally got it but the bride still looks better. Her hat, however, was another problem because it was white, against a white background so it looked like there was a bit of her head missing. I opted to paint it in with acrylic paint to define it better.

The second example is a pendant but it was done in black and white.

I won't show the inside pictures because i didn't ask permission from the client but it looks the same as the others apart from color.
The base was black and the texture highlighted with white acrylic paint. I used ribbon again for the hinge.

Actually, the hinge is made from three ribbons for stability. The center ribbon crosses the entire pendant so you can tie a bow on the other end to keep it closed.
The stone on the front is a hematite cabochon to go with the black and white theme.
I was very pleased with this last one. Even though it still has the antique looking texture, the black and white gives it a more modern feel.

Picture Locket

I've been playing around with polymer clay again and I liked the idea of transferring black and white images onto the clay. It's a simple process, though you have to practice a little bit because it's easy to rub the ink off along with the paper if you're not careful, and the result is an antique-looking image.

You can make just a pendant out of if and I thought about using pictures of my children to try it out, but since I have two I didn't want to have to choose just one and getting a picture of the both of them is not an easy feat.

All this thinking got me to the conclusion that the best option for what I had in mind would be to make an old-fashioned locket since I could place both pictures inside. I was inspired by a picture of an icon box (you can check out my inspiration board on Pinterest) and made my locket out of copper-colored polymer clay.

I textured and aged it with acrylic paint and applied a gloss varnish. The pictures were transfered onto light flesh-tone clay. I used a natural stone cabochon on the cover, thread to bind both pictures and a lobster clasp to close it and also on top to attach it to a necklace, key-chain or anything else I want.

It turned out a bit larger than I had planned at first - 4 cm - because I didn't anticipate the inside frame when I started making it, but since it's polymer clay, it's still quite lightweight. I plan to make a simpler version next and maybe a round one instead of square.

I think these lockets are a great idea for moms, especially if they like antique-looking objects, since they can have an original piece of jewelry and also pictures of their kids all in one.

Silicone mold tutorial video

I made a video on how to make silicone molds out of small objects to use with polymer clay.
I use Siligum, a two part silicone compound that dries quickly and makes a flexible mold. This material makes a clear impression and captures every detail of the object being molded. You can use the mold to make duplicates of the objects in polymer clay, metal clay or resin. I focus on the difference between molding a thin or a thicker object and how to fix a hole in your mold.
I hope it's helpful.