A while ago when I was still going to classes, I was struggling to decide what to do next after one of my (many) disasters that could easily be considered fails. I thought I’d take things back to basics and just have a little play around with textures. If in doubt, texture is usually the way forward. After creating a few pieces of double sided pieces, I had the crazy idea to chop these all into tiny pieces and take it from there. At this point I did have a rough idea of what I wanted to do, but no real idea how to pull it off.
My very vague idea was to have a miniature mix and match collection of rings, pendants and earrings. None of the strips I’d cut would be long enough to make a full ring so I’d wanted to layer the strips to create a pieced together thing that would look good. How? Absolutely no idea how you form two tiny pieces of metal in a way that they will both fit perfectly together so they can be soldered. No clue. If anyone has any suggestions, that would be amazing.
When the ring pieces weren’t showing much promise, I decided to take a new approach. Forget over complicating things and stick with a mini range of pendants. This was a tester project after all and it would just be nice to get something finished and rethink my original from the beginning with a solid plan of how to achieve what I want to do.
Luckily I had treated myself to a little power drill a few months ago. You can’t have a pendant without somewhere for a chain to go. It would have been nicer to have smaller holes, especially in the smaller pieces, but that’s all I had available and with not knowing if anything would work in the first place, I didn’t want to go out and spend more money.
With jewellery, I love being able to stack things up or keep them simple. Basically I love having the option of adding more if I feel like being a bit more dramatic. I wanted to play around with all the pendant pieces being on separate chains for ultimate versatility. It was just a case of trialing different lengths to see what works best. A mannequin and a box of pins were complete lifesavers here.
I’m not completely giving up on my original idea, I just need to put a bit more planning into how it will work, how the soldering will go, and how comfortable potentially thick rings will be.
Stay tuned!
Much love!
Hannah
xxx