Back on The Bench

The nice rockhounding weather of the past few days left yesterday afternoon. In fact, last night we had high winds, snow, freezing rain, ice pellets and finally rain. Then this morning, we were back to wet snow.
It was time to move indoors and finish some pieces and what better stone to work on than a piece from Brazil! I felt warmer just touching the stone (heh,heh)- a nice piece of crazy lace jasper.
For the last few days, I have been experimenting with a totally new (at least to us) technique for setting stones using only copper wire and after a few failures, it worked!

If the stone looks familiar, it is because I did a similar piece with a different setting a few months back. Remember this:

As I said, the setting is unique, and allows me to use finer wire (in this case 20 gauge) and still have the stone snugly and firmly set. I took a picture of the back and if anyone reading the blog is interested, if you ask nicely I will send it to you via email.

On the yarn front, sales have been pretty brisk over the last week or so but we are expecting a large shipment early next week so the shelves will be fully stocked and with some new colours!

Cheers and hope to see you soon!

New Jewelry Line Takes Shape

Sorry for the gap in posting but both Vickie and I have been fighting problems with our sciatic nerve and just now getting back to what passes for normal around here. As some might know, my wife, Vickie, is an accomplished "Process Painter"- someone focused more on the creative process than the outcome.
For some time we have toyed with the idea of bringing this idea to our stone jewelry, meaning that while we hoped to showcase and enhance the beauty of the stone, our focus would be more on the creative process involved.
We finished our first piece yesterday and here it is.

The stone is a piece of Brazilian crazy lace jasper and it is secured by copper wire to a copper back plate covered with a piece of snake skin Vickie found in her "stash". Pretty well all of this is hand made. The stone was finished by hand as was the copper plate. All connectors and eyelets were hand made from copper. The cord is leather and it is about 4.5 cm. high.
We felt it looked somewhat like a bird so we called it Rufous after the State Bird of Brazil which has a similar colouring.
Our objective is to create jewelry that, while being beautiful, is also interesting and we hope to have a few dozen pieces in the store by the spring.
I have to confess that we had a ball working out the logistics and it doesn't hurt that Vickie appears to have one of  everything!
So let us know how we did and if you get the chance, stop by to see it in person as I can honestly say that the photo doesn't really do it justice.