I’d been wondering where this was for a month or so, and it turned out it had been in an inner pocket of my belt pouch all along, with the leather cord wrapped around it. The continual pressure (and probably the warmth) has pulled off a little of the paint, but that’s all. I’m fairly encouraged, overall!

This is seasoned holly, cut from a tree in my garden a few months back when a branch was threatening the elder across the way. I need a new short-bladed carving knife with a full-sized handle, so this is the first step towards that. For the blade, I’m going to use a dismounted Opinel No. 2.

These are always popular, but painting curves on the satin ribbon is awkward enough that I have terrible trouble getting around to finishing them off. One’s spoken for already, but the other will be up for sale when it’s done.

Like the Twelfth Night jewellery I made, these are cut from an old and much-used play script. They’re going to be quite a lot more ornate, though, using the text more as a background than a main feature, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they turn out.

I’ve added some new jewellery to my Etsy shop. This set are double-layered artist’s mountboard, cross-grained for strength & stiffness, and reinforced with a total of five or six layers of paint & varnish. I’ll put them up for strength against most metal jewellery, and I inadvertently managed to prove that they’re waterproof by leaving one in the pocket of my jeans before laundry day.

Because I’m nice, and because it’s quite thoroughly springtime (as opposed to the freak mini-summer we had last week) the code SUNSHINE will get you free shipping for a week or two.

There’s something quite special about varnishing a piece. On the one hand, it makes the colours glow and shine, jump out at you and grab the eye. On the other, it’s the no-changes-now point—once the varnish goes on, there’s not much you can do to change any problems.

Rationally, of course, that’s false – this varnish needs three coats to get the effect I want, and it’s easy enough to intersperse a correction. But it’s still a powerful state-change.

I’m doing this for a craft fair I’m attending—the Mad March Fair, at the Queen’s Head pub in Rye. If you’re in the right part of South-East England on Saturday 26th March, drop by and say hi! I’m taking prints, jewellery, masks, and some of these notebooks along, and I know there will be a lot of other amazing craftspeople there too.

Sounds like a silly idea, but it’s actually a really good material—tough, lightweight, and durable. That black & silver choker is made from Fabriano Tiziano pastel paper, folded & laminated, and then very thoroughly varnished. It ends up very like thin leather, but it’s entirely vegan. (Not all papers are; most art paper uses animal gelatin for sizing. Fabriano use acrylic sizing, though.)

I’d made a couple of these already, without having had the time, or a model, to show them off properly, but these two were done (and put into my intermittent prototype giveaway bonanza) as an experiment to see whether I could attach a D-ring to the underside in a secure and decorative fashion. The answer, it turns out, is “yes”—the knot at the back isn’t going to be proof against a hard tug, if any of my customers were prone to do such things, but even if I’d put a buckle in the D-ring and strap would still be quite strong enough.

I’ve also been making more of these pendants—they’re artist’s mountboard with a ribbon loop, very light (barely a gram each) and rather tough. The design is Roberson liquid metal ink, done with a No. 6 italic nib.

Here’s the first of the pieces of epoxy jewellery I posted about recently, modelled by its happy new owner. The image links to a larger closeup view. When I’ve passed over the other two to their final destinations, I’ll see if I can get pictures of those to show off too.

Here are three of the pieces I was experimenting with at the beginning of February – I’ve been working on them on and off, coat after coat of paint and then varnish, and now they’re sitting on my desk waiting to go to their new owners. They’re all prototypes – I’m happy with the look of each of them, but there are lessons to be learned from them all too.

Pendant, 45x65mm, weighs 21g. Ultramarine swirled panel in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. One of the advantages of using two-part epoxy over polymer clay is that it cures at room temperature, rather than having to be heated in the oven, so I can use acrylic paints and (as here) inset rectangles of artist’s mountboard, without worrying about what that sort of heat will do to it. Next time I do one of these, I’ll drill a larger hole (or two holes) to loop cord through directly, rather than trying to bend a jump ring threaded through that thickness of solid material.

Brown & gold choker slide, 35mm square, weighs 8g. Sits a bit lower on the ribbon than it does in the picture – next time, I’ll centre the slide on the back a bit more. I actually made three others using the same paper, but didn’t clean the work area quite thoroughly enough and got flecks of epoxy on the front surface. So that’s another area to be careful with.

Aventurine & bronze choker slide, 20x30mm, weighs around 12g. Aventurine cabochon stone in an epoxy setting, with an antiqued bronze finish. I need to be a bit more careful about moulding the epoxy around the slide – this one ended up weighing a bit more than it had to, and I had to clear the slide holes with a scalpel after it had finished curing.

Usefully, System 3 “Rich Gold” paint and Tri-Art “Iridescent Gold Deep” ink have almost exactly the same colour quality, so I can easily switch between them for a project.

Whilst I’m only about 20% pagan at the best of times (most of the rest is Quaker) I still like to keep the High Days, and today was Imbolc. Or, for the Christian side of me, St Brigid’s Day – patron of poets, blacksmiths, and healers, and always one of my favourites.

My normal artistic practice on High Days is to try and make something new – the rule is that anything I make has to be kept or given away, rather than sold. That’s partly just to make sure that I remember why I’m doing this, and as a reminder to try new things or go back to techniques I haven’t used in ages.

Today, I started out by playing around with some two-part epoxy putty, and there’s some jewellery hardening across the room – a stick pin, three brooches, and two choker slides. The brooches I’ve done before, but that was years ago, before I acquired a Proxxon drill for sanding and buffing. (Vorsprung-grade German engineering, slightly better than Dremel in its class.) There is almost no craftsman’s task I hate more than sanding things by hand, and consequently I’m not very good at it. Late tomorrow, or in a few days, they’ll be ready to paint & varnish, and we’ll see how they turn out.

After that, I started playing around with some colour/paper/glaze combinations I hadn’t tried before, and this was the result. It’s Ara dark bronze acrylic on Gmund bierpapier (Boc), with three coats of lightly gold-tinted Rheotech gloss gel glaze. I was rather impatient, and put the second & third glaze coats on when the first was touch-dry instead of properly clarified, but I rather like the clouded effect in this case – it looks like a faux-nori finish, which entertains me.

I made this one for a reading of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus.

Photo by Nick Metcalfe.

I carved this block quite a while ago, but was disappointed with the effect just using printer’s ink. When I decided to try the gold I’d mixed up, though, it looked much better – the texture and gleam give the design much more depth. Of course, I’m also using heavily textured handmade paper here, so that makes a difference too. This is some rather nice khadi paper – it’s not even slightly lightfast, sadly, but I don’t think that makes a difference here.