Huge clearance sale and it hurts...

So I´ve done it. I´ve marked down everything in my Etsy shops 50%. I´m going to move on to new adventures and will hopefully not have the time to create intricate wire pieces.

My adventure is a webshop with jewelry, launched for Swedes at first, but perhaps with the rest of Europe as target in the future.

I will sell mostly other peoples designs. I´m tired of the jewelry webshops that are around here. They are either glam-girl, low-price, crappy material shops. Or they are more arts & crafts like in a sence they are almost pornographic in their love of the material that is used. And they often praise the "Nordic light and Swedish simplicity" too much for my taste.

My shop will focus on a pure love of jewelry. I will sell jewelry in many categories: classical, fun, expensive, colorful, simple or intricate. The thing they will have in common is they are very easy to wear, they are made with a glimpse in the eye and they are feminine.

Jewelry is supposed to be fun and make you feel like the girl you once were, standing in front of a mirror, all dressed up in your mum´s finest clothes (too big of course, but it didn´t matter).

So watch our for news here until I move on to a blog related to my new webshop.

BUT WILL I STOP MAKING JEWELRY?

No, don´t think anything can stop me from doing that (except time and a huge succes with selling jewelry made by other designers than me...). I will probably focus on making jewelry, that are less time consuming to create. So no wire designs at this moment.

To be continued...

What I´ve been up to...

Just wanted to show you some of the things I´ve been working on.

This is a commission order where the customers bought all the material. It was a challenge, but fun.

It was a long time since I made any of these bangles. It´s based on a tutorial by Eni Oken, a wonderful american jewelry designer.

The colour combination chosen by the customer is wonderful, beautiful rhodocrosite and rhodonite beads with blood red garnet. They mix so well with the oxidized silver.

Now I only have a few commission orders left. Then I´m going to list new pieces in my shop.

I am working...

No blogging in a long time. But I haven´t vanished. I have several commission orders and I´m working on starting a second business too.

Of course I feel blessed when having special orders. But my sketches are piling up and I feel I have a lot of creativity that needs to erupt soon.

Beware for new designs at the end of March :)

Source of my style PART II

I recently wrote about my great grandmothers necklace as a source for my love of intricate designs. But something of equal importance to the origin of my style, as the necklace, is my period as a guard and guide at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. This was something I did while studying for a masters degree in Art.

The palace in Stockholm was built in the 18th century and is fully furnished with a lot of treasures from that time. Everything from the decorations in the ceilings to details on doors is so delicate. I also worked at the Royal Armoury where all armours and clothes from past monarchs are kept. The museum displays the most beautiful gold-embroidered wedding clothes and coronation pieces. They even have a stuffed horse, Streiff, which belonged to the king Gustav II Adolf who was murdered at the battle in Lützen 1632!

One exhibition at the Royal Armoury have etched itself into my memory more than any other. It was the exhibit of jewelry from the court jeweller WA Bohlin, a colleague to the more famous Fabergé in Russia. WA Bohlin choose to escape Russia to Stockholm when the revolution started 1917. In Stockholm the firm soon became court jeweller and are so still today.

The jewelry exhibition showed masterpieces dated back to the 19th century. As a guard I had plenty of time to enjoy and study all the jewelry. I was totally enchanted buy the precious gems, shapes and the intricacy of the designs. I still have the exhibition catalogue and now as a jewelry designer myself (playing in a totally different league though) I look at all the beauty even more impressed.
If you ever visit Stockholm you must see the Royal Palace and the Armoury!

Dresses I would love to make jewelry for

My favorite type of custom orders are when a customer wants something made for a special gown or dress. Nothing triggers my creative engine like that kind of request. I love to come up with designs that fits how the dress is cut, the textures and the colours. Just like I did for sweet Erin who had the most beautiful vintage 50´s gown for her wedding.

Erins dress is all cream coloured and wrapped up in lace and finished with a chocolate brown ribbon. I´m very happy with the earrings I made for this dress. It´s a swirly designs that captures the expression of the lace and the texture of the fabric. And the smokey quartz, brown and cream coloured freshwater pearls I put on the earrings match the colour of the dress nicely. Do I have to say the photos from Erins wedding was like a dream! She was so beautiful!
Here are some dresses I would love to make jewelry to go with. First is a dress by Anna Sui with (again) a beautiful lace pattern. I think I would choose tiny spinel rondelles for this one contrasted with one single bright coloured stone. Earring would be best for this dress. With a dramatic design.

Anna Sui also designed this psychedelic paisley patterned dress with vibrant colours. For this one I would love to make a cuff with fuchsia and tangerine colours sprinkled with details in 14k gold filled.

Finally I would feel blessed if I could make something for this 1940´s vintage dress. Or actually it feels like I´ve already made it! Don´t you think the FIRST LOVE necklace would look lovely with this dress? If you feel really romantic?

Vintage Textile sells this beautiful dress.

The source of my style

If it´s possible at all to point out a certain object to be the source of my style it has to be this necklace. My great grandmother, Fanny, a lady with Sami origin (natives living in the north of Sweden) got this as a gift 1947.

It´s a 925 sterling silver pendant with a rococo lady and beautiful ornaments. I´ve always adored this piece. The design contains everything I want to achive with my own jewelry; interesting swirly details, a feminine expression and a wonderful balanced composition (even though it´s assymetrical).

Ever since I got this necklace in my hands I´ve loved it. And when I found it again today and polished it - it all seemed so clear to me. This necklace must be the explanation for my love for swirly jewelry. Of course being brought up in the 70´s with stripes, large flower patterns and pine wood furniture can also be reason to my preferance for inricate, swirly and shiny materials :).

Being a Swede I´m supposed to embrace the nordic "blond" minimalistic designs so common here. I think no other people has taken "less is more" as serious as the Swedes. :)

I don´t have any daughters of my own, but will hopefully have grand daughters to pass this on to. And I´m sure they will treasure it like I do – even if fashion changes all the time and it will only lie in their jewelry boxes.

Do YOU have a particular object that can be the source of your taste and style? I´d love if you shared the story here. It doesn´t have to be about something that inspires you to make jewelry - it can be anything.

Learn to mix and match colours

Even if I´ve been making jewelry since 2004, I still have a hard time to combine colours. Most of the time I end up with using only hues of one colour. And I so admire jewelry artists that are good at combining three or more colours like Sky Dreams or Elle a Belle. But I work hard to get by this and I think I´ve become better in the past year.

I use some tricks that I want to share to you poor designers that are in my situation...I know most of you are not. So I guess this post will not help many, since most people seem to manage this fundamental skill !

The first thing you should start with if you want to approve how you handle colour, is to read some about colour theory. You may recognize some words from this in the back of your head, you probably heard them in school; primary colour, complementary colour and so on. This kind of theoretical information is great to know, but are not very inspirational.

Today there are many tools available at the Internet to help you mix and match colours. Mainly they are developed by web designers, but they can be handy for more people depending on colour. For example, try the “colour wheel machine” you can find at Colours on the web. There you can spin the wheel virtually and get examples of colour combinations you can use in your jewelry. The tricky part can be to find stones that match the example. If you want to use what the pro´s use you can download Color Wheel Pro where you can get more variations. Eni Oken, well known jewelry designer, has a colour match program for free download too.

But finding combinations you like are actually easier than that. Just look at nature, on butterflies, flowers and birds. Nature never chooses wrong and you can find amazing colour schemes that you can transform to your jewelry. Or why not take that pile of glossy magazines saving dust on your coffee table and use it for this purpose. Pictures of interiors or fashion photos give you an endless combination of colours.

All the examples so far are great, but my favourite way to find combinations is from fabrics with patterns. I just choose one I like and try to dissect which colors they´ve used, and I often end up with 5 colours or more. I also note which one is the dominant to achive the same balance.
So far I´ve never had that many matching stones at home, but I have managed to use this method to come up with a combination of three colours. And that is much for me!!!!
Make 2009 your colour breakthrough!

Use a wiki when creating custom orders

Custom orders where you work close with the customer to decide which material you´re going to use are fun. But the e-mail traffic following such a mission can be overwhelming. Sometimes it can be hard to keep track of all information; what has been said and not.

Now I have found a way to make this work a lot easier and I want to share it with other jewelry designers. I´ve started to use wikis to keep all information gathered in one place and reachable for both my customer and I.

This is something I started to use at my daytime job when planning for festivals and other projects together with other organisations.

Using a wiki is so easy. You set up a wiki, which is like a simple website where you can add folders and pages, upload pictures and other documents. Then you invite other users and make them only able to read the content or add information themselves. They can always write comments on everything you add. Everytime the wiki is updated you get a notification by email.

Now you don´t have to go through several e-mails for certain information. You just go to the right folder to find it. And I guess it´s a great way to avoid disputes with the customer too, you always have the same information.

Does it sound tricky and confusing? Watch Commoncrafts “Wikis in plain English” at Youtube.

I use http://www.pbwiki.com/ because there you don´t have to pay to avoid others to see the information. http://www.wikispaces.com/ has a layout I prefer, but you have to pay a fee to make it private.

Large projects have become so much more fun since I started to use wikis. Now the whole family use wikis for planning trips, parties and even business plans.

Try it!

Wanted - more members for WAG

The Wire Artisans Guild is looking for new members to join our team!
The Wire Artisans Guild is a group of wire jewelry designers and artists who have assembled for camaraderie and to help each other promote our Etsy shops.
We will be accepting 10 new members and please understand that your work will be juried in order to become a guild member. We are an Etsy street team so you must be an Etsy seller. To apply for an application and read more about becoming a member visit our team store. www.WireArtisansGuild.etsy.com

One of our members, talented Anna-Karin from Små Blå has made an excellent post about this on her blog. Visit her and read more about the criteria to become a member. And while you are there, enjoy her jewelry!
www.smabla.blogspot.com

Custom order - cuff

When I started with wire wrapping I used to make this kind of cuffs. I had learned from tutorials by Eni Oken: http://www.enijewelry.com/ . It was fun but very time consuming. So for more than a year now I haven´t been making these.

But now I have a custom order for a cuff with rhodocrosite and garnet. And I´m exited! And the order is of the kind when you work close with the customer to decide which material will be used. I love that!

Red carpet jewelry

Looking for inspiration for new fabulous designs? Why not have a look at what all the celebrities where wearing for their red carpet moments previous years.

http://www.diamond-legend.info/people/redcarpet.html



I love to google around the web for fantastic outfits and jewelry. It makes my creative mind go off instantly. So whenever my mind is empty when sitting at the working bench I just go to the computer and look for images and wait for that color, detail or story that will give me ideas.

As told in previous posts FAIRY TALES is my source of inspiration for spring 2009. For this I´ve found a wonderful site with a lot of original stories and the history behind them. Got my head full of ideas. Now I just need time :)

Fairy tale collection

I´m starting off 2009 with a new collection, FAIRY TALES, with intricate and colorful jewelry inspired by characters in stories from all over the world.

First story to be transferred into a piece of jewelry is 1000 and one nights. The beautiful SCHEHERAZADE inspired to a pair of dangling spicy earrings.

Material:925 sterling silver wire and findings. Large whiskey quartz briolettes. Rhodolite garnet briolettes and tiny faceted tunduru sapphire rondelles. Cultured fresh water pearls. Oxidized and tumbled.Size:2"/5cm

Behind the scene

VOILA - no more mess!!!
Originally uploaded by SuzyQJewelry

The picture shows my petite studio where the adventures of this blog will take place...

And yes, this is right after I´ve gotten rid of my mess: little bits of wires that only amuses the cat. But normally I´m pretty organized. All the semi-precious beads are sorted by color in the white drawer under the bench. There lies the silver wire too.

On the wall I have a very functional and cheap plier rack - it´s just a nail in the wall :)