Filigree stampings are one of my favourite jewellery making components. The lace-like patterns add a really delicate touch to your designs and yet they add substance at the same time. With such a wide range of shapes and finishes to choose from, they are also very versatile. Here's some ideas to get you going. 1. Use them as dangles in a charm bracelet. Dangle lacy filigrees from jump rings and they become charms on a charm bracelet. In this design they're lilypads for the frogs! 2. Form them into napkin rings. The soft metal of these square brass stampings made them easy to shape around a cardboard cylinder. Connect them together with jump rings and beads to give the napkin ring stability. 3. Turn them into a jewellery bail to slip the stringing material through. This one does double duty by adding decorative detail to the front of the pendant as well! 4. Wrap them around a teardrop crystal to form a custom fitting bead cap. 5. Add a cluster of smaller beads to the centre 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......

Most of the mail in my letterbox these days seems to come in those dreaded window faced envelopes. So I love it when postie delivers me a package instead. And oh how lucky I am - I've received a package of goodies from Cousin Corp to play with! It's full of Crystazzi crystals (sparkle, sparkle), Trinkettes (yum, yum) and beads from the Jewelry Basics range. I've talked about Jewelry Basics before - it's the range of beads you go to for all the jewellery making staples you need, the types of beads and findings you always reach for when you're making jewellery. So with such a bounty of goodies to play with, I am designating this week: Cousin Corp Week . Remember those gorgeous resin butterfly charms I made earlier for International Charm Day? Well, as luck would have it, they will work beautifully with the selection of blue and green beads in my Cousin package. Today I've selected the dangling charms from the Glass Metal Bead Cluster set. This is a selection of ......

Being just one week after Easter, there are a few Easter egg wrappers lying around at my place. I love the pretty, metallic foils and hate to throw them away so here's one way to incorporate them into your crafting. I've used one to provide the base colour for today's project - a resin charm for International Charm Day  on 28th April - a little more about that at the end of this post. But let's get on with today's project: a sweet little resin bottle cap charm. Foil is really delicate to punch but if you feed it into the hole punch with a piece of scrap paper to give it more body, you'll get a nice clean circle. I've also used mylar in this project and that needs to be sandwiched between two pieces of paper to punch it out. Mylar is a bit plastic-y and the second sheet of paper really helps in getting a clean cut. I used this same trick to punch the Antiquing Tissue paper from Collections Elements . You can discard the paper circles or keep them for anot......

I'm quite a big fan of donut components: you can wire wrap them, dangle things from them, even slide things through them. That hole in the middle gives you so much opportunity to think outside the square and come up with some unique ways of putting your jewellery designs together. So I thought I'd share with you a few of the ways I like to use them. Use the donut as part of a toggle clasp and show it off as part of the design. Connect them together with fancy jump rings Use them to frame another bead Slide a long lariat through the donut Treat them as large holed beads and thread them on a thick stringing material Dangle them as charms Wire wrap them, or wrap a coil of wire around them and then dangle beads from the coil. Yep, that hole in the middle really makes them very versatile. I hope I've inspired you to look through that hole and see some new possibilities. Pin For Later! 'Til next time..... If you can't get enough of My Tutorials and you want even more ......

There is something very meditative about the art of Zentangle. I'm not much into doodling - never really have been but every time I put my pen to paper to Zentangle, I find myself totally engrossed in the repetitive nature of this art form. Maybe there is a doodler inside me after all! It is such an inexpensive and very portable hobby: I have Zentangled at the doctor's surgery, whilst waiting in the car to pick up DD from work and in planes (yippee! something to do other than watch movies and read magazines). In fact anywhere I find myself waiting for some one or some thing. All you need is a smooth white surface to work on, black permanent markers and a graphite pencil. So far, I've been skipping the pencil, preferring the cleaner, hard lines of the markers. I use Sakura's Microperm 01 for the detailed work and the IDenti Pen where I want the coverage to be heavier. I usually work on very small pieces like these disks from DIY Bangles that the patterns will fill qu......