Today I learned that not all creativity ends up being in the form of artwork or in a piece of jewellery. Sometimes creativity comes in the form of solutions. Take last night. I had mixed a batch of resin but had some left over and as I hate wasting anything I decided to use the last of my resin by painting it onto some Friendly Plastic beads I had sitting around. Resin is great for protecting the foil of Friendly Plastic and it also makes the beads much more durable for use in jewellery. I usually make my Friendly Plastic beads on bamboo skewers so it makes sense to thread them back on to a skewer whilst coating them with resin. The skewers can be pushed into a block of foam to keep them upright whilst they cure. All was going well, but when I checked on them this morning, I discovered the resin had run down the skewers and the beads were stuck hard! Now, it's not for lack of experience that I know this will happen if I don't pay attention to them until the resin gets to gel st...

Most creative types will tell you that you can find inspiration everywhere, even when you're doing regular, everyday things and all it takes is for you to take the time to really see. Today, I found myself in that place whilst I was making lunch; there on the kitchen bench was the fruit bowl - gorgeous fresh, plump fruit - the inspiration for some fun charms for International Charm Day. With just a bit of wire, a few seed beads and a wire jig, I'll show you how to make your own delicious fruity earrings. Make one of each as I did, or make a matching set of your favourite fruit. You'll need some fruit shaped outlines to use as a template for your fruity earrings. Images from kids colouring in books are a good place to look but otherwise search the internet for simple outline shapes. Reduce them to about 2.5cm (1") and then place them under a wire jig. You can see that I couldn't line the pegs up exactly over the lines of the image but that's OK because you'l...

Exciting day, today! I took delivery of two new chairs for the studio. Well, at least, I got two boxes with chairs in them. Empire Furniture are having a sale on these chairs at the moment and they match the chairs I already have in my studio..... YAAAAY! On top of that they are taking an extra $50 off each chair for their existing customers..... Woohoo! What more could I ask for?!! When I picked them up, the kind gentleman asked me if I'd like them put together for $30 each. When I asked him how long it takes, he said about 2 minutes. Umm, I'm no maths genius, but that works out to $15/minute. I don't think so. I'm a dab hand when it comes to assembling Ikea furniture so I'm sure I can tackle these and I'll keep the $60 thanks! So tackle them I did! The first one took about 10 minutes because I got to this point and didn't understand the next instruction. But the second one took only a couple of minutes as promised! And I'm christening one of them as I...

Sometimes things don't turn out quite the way I envisioned them when I'm working in the studio. Take this flat resin ring. I cast it during a workshop on the weekend and was really pleased that the outer surfaces were bubble free. The mould has a matt finish but I really wanted a shiny ring so after trimming and sanding it, I moved on to buffing it to a high gloss. And that's where it went wrong. It turns out that the fine sanding I had done removed a very thin outer layer of resin and exposed  numerous minute bubbles on the surface that I didn't see until the polish got into them. Grrr!   Polishing the resin to a high gloss is the last step in the process of making the ring and it takes a fair bit of time and elbow grease to get it to that point. So having come this far, I decided to disguise the worst of the bubbles by strategically placing some Swarovski chatons over the worst of them. So follow my progress below to see how it turned out. Drilling holes to the right ...

Welcome to the third project in my unofficial Cousin Corp Week. Today I'm using Trinkettes, Small Silver Curb Chain and 6mm round silver mirror beads.  All the findings I've used in this project come from the 59 piece Starter Pack in bright silver. The only exceptions are the bail, and the memory wire. I wanted to do something a little different with the Trinkettes that Cousin provided me with. Trinkettes are large holed beads so they're best suited to bulky stringing materials. But rather than thread them on standard Trinkette chain, I've opted to do something a little different and use the small curb chain to drape around and frame my butterfly focal. I've used a length of turquoise velour tubing from my collection to add colour and also to keep the chain in place. To start with, cut a length of chain 31.5 inches (81cm) long and fold it into 6 equal lengths. Open the end link with pliers.... ..... and join it to the other end so you have one continuous length of ...

For the second post in my Cousin Corp Week , I've created a multi-strand bracelet using a resin butterfly charm as the focal. You can see how I made the charm here . For this project, I've used the Pearl and Crystal mix in green and tied it all together with silver spacers. The first thing that needed to be done for this project was to work out how to incorporate the flat bottle cap charm into a multi strand bracelet. I could have glued one of the silver spacers to the back but they have a high point in the middle and they don't sit flush against the bottle cap back. So instead, I decided to wrap it with a square silver filigree from my collection so that I could weave the tiger tail through the back of the filigree to hold the strands in place. I went for a simple arrangement with the beads and threaded on the pearls interspersed with crystals. The silver spacers keep the strands firmly in place so they don't twist but they also tie in the silver filigree wrapped foca...