Leather has really come into it's own as a jewellery style in recent times. I just love the way that it works equally as well for the country girl as it does for the city girl. Today I'm dressing up a simple strip of metallic leather with acrylic pearls and rhinestones to give it  an urban chic look. Don't you love how well pearls and crystals go with leather? Finished length: 9” (23cm) Here's what you'll need: Materials: Sizzix 9”x3” Metallic Leather TrimPiece – Bronze Assortment of clear acrylic rhinestones 2 x 14mm white round pearl  flat backs 4 x 10mm white round pearl  flat backs Assortment of white teardrop pearl flat backs Silver snap setter kit  (includes setting tool) Beacon 527 Adhesive Tools: Hammer Rotating hole punch Ruler and pencil S cissors toothpick Decide on the layout of the rhinestones and pearls for the cuff according to your assortment. Download this placement guide to help you. The guide will help you work out how wide your leather strip ne......

I always find doing jewellery repairs an interesting challenge - you can learn so much about jewellery construction by studying the way the piece has been put together. Many of the costume jewellery pieces I've repaired over the years are constructed using different methods to those we regularly use as jewellery makers today and I find I learn valuable techniques to add to my repertoire by studying the way a piece has been constructed. The baroque pearl earrings on my desk today are a really good example so I want to share with you the step-by-step reconstruction of them. My customer received them as a gift from her mother so they have sentimental value to her but after years of wear, the fine gauge wire that they're constructed with has become kinked, making the earrings unattractive. So a remake is in order - my brief is to try to recreate the original design if possible. The earrings have an unusual construction method: one continuous length of wire runs through the pearl a......

Over the next month I'll be working with glass pearls a lot. You see, my youngest sister will soon be celebrating a milestone birthday and I'm so excited to be organising her party. She dreams of one day travelling to Paris but as that's not on the cards just at the moment, we will be bringing France to her! To help make it an affair to remember, there will be a handmade pearl bracelet for every female who is attending, made by moi! So here's the first one, classic black and white: Ideally, I'd be using 1mm stretch elastic to string the glass pearls for this bracelet but because there is only a single hole on the back of the rose and I'm stringing a double stranded bracelet, I'm using 0.5mm. Finished size: Internal diameter 65mm (2 5/8") approximately So here's what you'll need: Six 4mm, four 6mm and thirtyeight 8mm white glass pearls Four 2-hole silver and diamonte rhinestone spacer bars Black resin rose (mine is approximately 35mm across) 0.5......

Got broken jewellery? If anyone mentions that they have a piece they no longer wear because it's broken I usually jump in feet first and offer my jewellery making skills to fix it for them. I love doing it but I'm a sucker for punishment! I never think to ask questions like "Do you have all the components?" or What is it made from and how old is it?" or other important questions such as "Is it valuable, sentimental or a favourite piece that you can't bear to throw away?" Those questions invariably come later when I run into problems putting it together. It usually results in me sitting on the piece for weeks/months before I decide to tackle it again. That was the case with this one - it is missing 4 black pearls and 2 peach pearls and it is also showing signs of wear on the gold spacer beads. Broken double-stranded freshwater pearl necklace held together with a fraying knot Matching the pretty peach-coloured freshwater pearls was difficult and in th......

I did it! I solved my little design challenge AND used up almost all the remaining beads from the four necklaces . So now I'll let you in on what the challenges were and how I solved them. For this last piece I was planning a simple double strand floating necklace. Pearls always look great when strung this way so I created a 40" length of floating beads on white tiger tail. I decided to try out my magic crimping tool to turn the crimp tubes into beads so that they would match the mini silver beads from the original necklace. As I worked on it I kept thinking how crisp the white tiger tail looked against the pearls and silver spacers. It was hard work crimping those tubes into balls but it was worth the effort... it was looking really good! But when I tried it on I hated it: the white tiger tail made the silver beads look too dark and it had no focal point! So a rethink of the design was in order. I decided to cut the length in half and make a single stranded floating necklace......