Catching up...

More than three months have passed since my last post.

Here's what I've been up to in the meantime:

Made my first brass jewelry:

Played around with some new designs:

And some old ones...

Made some gifts:

And fulfilled commissions:

 

 It's been a busy three months. :)

Royal Elegance: Lapis Lazuli with Silver.

Lapis Lazuli and Sterling Silver, always such a classy combination. I wonder why I haven't tried it before.

Well, here's my first Lapis creation: I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out :)

Simple Elegance - Green Onyx and Sterling Silver

Beautiful, AA grade Green Onyx elongated dew drop briolettes have been wire wrapped into a very simple frame to accentuate the beauty of the stones.

Sold.

Red Currant Earrings

This is one of my most recent works. Perfect summery earrings made of untarnished copper (I might still oxidize them, haven't decided yet) and really bright red 8 mm coral beads.

They are almost 2.5" long, and of considerable weight.

Peridot Feathers

Netted copper feathers. The pendant was made out of a leftover frame from the mixed metal "Endless Road" necklace (made to order). It's quite long, but it looks just perfect on a long copper chain.

Hello again!

Here I am again after a long-long absence.

Since my last entry I have moved back to Romania, opened an Etsy shop and a local online shop in Romania, on Breslo.

In the following days I will try to update you with my work in the last few months...

Here's the first one (not in chronological order).

This set was a custom order based on an older design, the "Endless Road" necklace. I remade it, and improved on it a little bit, by using mixed metals in its construction: copper and silver filled wire.

Endless Road

I've been designing lots of bracelets in the past few weeks, as some of you might have noticed. I wasn't really into bracelets before, never really wore any, but now that might change, just as my adversity to wearing long earrings changed after starting designing my own jewelry.

For my latest bracelet I got inspired by an abundance of spiral themed designs by some of my flickr friends (weirdlywired, kelpticfest). I've never made multiple spirals from a single piece of wire before, and it took me several unsuccessful trials to finally get it (reasonably) right... A pile of unfinished spirals is a painful reminder that I need to practice more before mastering the spiral technique perfectly...

For now, this is the best I could do: a pretty nice bracelet and earrings to match it. Love the design, I'm happy with the execution, too (just don't forget to practice more).

Somehow these flowing spirals remind me of a labyrinth, or an endless road that keeps returning into itself...

Leaf Earrings for the Amazonite Bracelet

This is my new thing: matching large earrings with bracelets, not with pendants or necklaces. As much as I disliked large earrings in the past, before I started designing jewelry, I prefer them now to smaller earrings, probably because I find it easier to design large pieces, my creativity flows more freely when I have a larger surface to work on. Unfortunately large earrings don't go very well with necklaces, so in the future whenever the central piece of a design is a larger pair of earrings, I'll match it with a bracelet (or maybe a ring), and design necklaces separately (with or without earrings).

So here are the earrings I made for the Amazonite Leaf Bracelet.

And here is the complete set. Again, I'm absolutely in love with its rustic feel:

Coiled

A couple of years ago, when I was still experimenting with different types of jewelry making techniques, trying to find the one that would suit me best, I made several coiled earrings and earring/pendant sets, as a way of perfecting my wire wrapping skills.

I'm posting the designs here, as I'm thinking of revisiting the technique sometime in the future, and I want to have the old ones at hand, for comparison.

Here's a montage of my coiled designs, all shapes and forms: