Finally! Some Jewlery Photos to Show You!!!

I've been busy with my jewelry - believe it or not. Matter of fact, I'll be taking Thursday and Friday off from work to get ready for my next show at Chop Suey in Seattle. Tonight, I took another class from my bead shop - The Bead Factory. I'm thinking I'll take a couple of photos of the project that I worked on and will post them at a later date.

So, here are some photos of the jewelry that I'll be listing on Etsy soon. I'm not sure if I'll post before my next show or after my next show. I'll guess I'll do what time allows.

And now for the latest creations to come out of the Dancing Monkey Jewelry Studios (drum roll, please!)...


These are my new favorites - round aquamarine beads, hand-made fine silver fused rectangles and handmade fine silver ear wires.




Aqua Terra Jasper (aka: Impression Jasper) beads, sterling silver daisy spacers, and hand made ear wires.










Prehnite briolettes dangle from oxidized fine silver circles, hand made fine silver ear wires.







Pink freshwater pearls dangle from rustic fused fine silver triangles, hand made ear wires.





These are my edited photos. Now all I have to do is download these photos to Etsy and come up with a lyrical description of the earrings. Then I have about 100 more photos of jewelry that I have to edit (mostly cropping and resizing) before I can list them on Etsy and my icraft.ca shop. I can't believe how much work it is to sell jewelry on-line! However, if your curiosity gets the best of you, you can mosey over to my flickr site and see more of my jewelry photography -

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dancingmonkeyjewelry

Also, I still have to edit my photos from my last craft show - they're huge and take a long time to download. What will happen, most likely, is that the photos from my last show will be displayed from my next show (this Sunday).

I've got a lot of work to do between now and this weekend. Good lord, I had no idea how much work this would be. I'm off to bed.

Antique Floral Button...

Antique Floral Button...
Originally uploaded by Dancing Monkey Jewelry

I love Precious Metal Clay (PMC). When I first learned about it I couldn't quite grasp what it was. You have to admit that clay that turns into fine silver is pretty trippy, right? Then I saw a demonstration on how to make pendants out of PMC at my local bead store. I was totally amazed - I had to learn more about the wonders of PMC. So, I signed up for the next available class. Talk about a great time. Working with PMC is easy. What you can create with PMC is as easy or hard as you want to be. No matter what you do - you're going to end up looking like a rock star - provided you don't melt your creation in the kiln.

This is my very first attempt at working with PMC. I didn't do any sort of carving or anything that actually took any sort of skill. This piece was made by mushing a lump of clay into a silicon mold. The mold had been made from an antique button - and of course there was a bit of cleaning up that I had to do before I could fire the piece. I had to smooth out any rough spots and place the hole in the pendant for a bail after the pendant dried (the most nerve wracking part). It sort of reminded me of working with greenware in ceramics. Most of the work that I did with this pendant was in the polishing, burnishing and oxidizing it. I wanted to make an ultra feminine necklace to go with this pendant - so I ended up using fuschia, pink and white freshwater pearls.

As a jewelry maker, you'd think that I would have ton jewelry, right? Well, at least I thought I'd have treasure troves of jewelry when I first started. Well, I don't. Matter of fact, I hardly have any - just a few pieces that I find myself wearing on a daily basis: my wedding ring, my silver bracelet that I bought in Santa Fe, and five stack rings that made while playing around and watching "Apollo 13" (there's a story there but I won't bore you with the details). However, this is the one piece of jewelry that I have made that I will keep for myself. It's mine and no one elses.

Check out the links to the PMC Guild, Cool Tools and the Society of American Silversmiths for more information:

http://www.pmcguild.com/download/GettingStartedwithPMC.pdf

http://www.cooltools.us/articles.asp?id=127

http://www.silversmithing.com/1clay.htm