Jewelry: My collection

I'm participating in an Israeli blogger's challenge, and this round's theme is "Collection". Since there are a lot of beauty bloggers participating, I've decided to eschew the obvious choice of my nail polish stash, and talk about something else.

This is not all of my collection, but this is the part that sparks my creative juices: the decorative elements. I do have some other decorative elements squirreled away elsewhere, but these- the crystal and glass and semiprecious beads- these are my muse. I can stare at a box of beads for a few minutes and be inspired to a new project. I love my beads.

I've actually been collecting these for about ten years!

These two were my first ever sorters- the second one is a little jumbled, but these have been with me for so long I can't even remember where half of it came from. This is from back when I mostly used plastic, and glass beads were a rare treat.

This one is my main work box- it's got my most commonly used elements in it, as well as jump rings and crimping beads and such.

I actually took these photos in my brand new light box! I'm still figuring out the best way to use it, but I like these better than they would have come out otherwise.

And since it's a roughly cat sized box, Simon came to visit of course:

Don't forget to check out the rest of the bloggers doing the challenge!

An InLinkz Link-up

Jewelry Wednesday: Hila Benyamin (+NOTD)

Today I am actually showcasing someone else's jewelry! Which works out well, since I didn't really have time to make any jewelry this week.

A little while ago, I was invited to take part in a little beauty blogger event in Israel- around ten of us went to Tel Aviv on a Friday morning and got to model some lovely handcrafted jewelry by indie designer Hila Binyamin (Link to her Etsy and Facebook). It worked out quite well for me, since I got to have professional photos taken and I got a gold necklace out of it!

There were a lot of really nice photos, but I'm gonna try not to go overboard. One way or another, there is a lot of me in this post.

Since this is a pretty image-heavy post, I'm putting the rest of it under a cut. It's not ALL pictures of my face, I promise!

Jewelry Wednesday: Simple earrings

Well ok, it's past midnight here, but it's still Wednesday in most of the world! So I'm getting a little better.

Today I made some really simple earrings, to go along with one of my favorite necklaces, a turquoise and golden-brown bead delicate crimp necklace that goes with virtually everything I own:

(Side note: many of the items for sale on my etsy are things I originally designed for myself, but don't worry- if you buy from my site you will get one that is specially made to order.)

I used the same set of elements, minus the round matte-silvery beads:

And here is the finished result (sorry that they're kinda at a funny angle- they really lay flat, but I was twisting my head so I could take the picture and it went weird)

Anyway, that's it for tonight, hope you liked them!

The return of Jewelry Wednesday! (...on Thursday night)

 Gotta give me points for trying, no?

I'm going to try to make Jewelry Wedneday posts more often, I think. I keep reminding myself that I actually made this blog because of jewelry- two years before I even got into nail art! Of course back then, I made about three posts and then forgot it existed for over a year. But I'm going to try to recapture the original intent of this blog by posting about jewelry every now and then.

Closeups and WIP shots after the jump!

Introducing: Jewelry Wednesday!

Hey, remember when this was gonna be a jewelry and nail art blog? Anybody? No?

Well, it was. If you look way back at my posts from 2010, you can even see a couple of my early posts are about jewelry. The thing is, lately I've been letting my jewelry hobby fall by the wayside, which is a damn shame. So I'm hoping to remedy this by incorporating a special jewelry day every week. I plan to post a photo of something I'm working on/made recently/want to highlight.

Today I want to talk about my jewelry history: I can't even remember how long ago I stared making jewelry, it would have to be at least since I graduated high school. Even before then, my mom got me a bead loom some time in my early teens, and I used it avidly for years. I still occasionally dig it up and play around with it. I may eventually incorporate bead loom jewelry into my store.

In eleventh grade my class had a Purim fair for charity. That was when I discovered my "jewelry hub"- a couple of blocks in Tel Aviv that are simply packed with jewelry supply stores. A friend and I had been put in charge of a jewelry booth, and we went around from store to store asking them if they had any items they wanted to discard or discontinue and would give us for free. It yielded a surprising amount of material, albeit of questionable quality. But still, we weren't trying to make Chanel jewelry, just some cute costume pieces to make a couple of bucks for charity.

When we got back to school, we sat on the floor of my dorm room and just played around with beads and wire all night. By morning, I was hooked.

I didn't really start making higher quality stuff until I graduated, at which point I went out and bought some pliers, wire, and crimping beads and went to town.

One of my first designs was the pomegranate charm necklace that I put at the top of the entry- to date it's still my most popular item.

This entry is getting pretty long already, so I'm going to tie it up here- more next week!

For any curious- links to my shop are on the top and on the right hand sidebar.

Delusions of grandeur

Hehe, here I was innocently thinking that by now I'd be so accomplished: I'd send out my Etsy orders, I'd make my post about the Olamot booth, I'd have lunch prepared for tomorrow, anything.

You know what I've done? I've finally put together an RSS feed for the polish blogs that I've been following for months anyway. So productive of me, huh? It's 3 AM and I need to make at least one bracelet by tonight becuase I've reached the deadline of when I can ship to her. I think that's all I'll do for tonight.

I already have at least six posts in mind to do "when I have time" which is basically going to be never. Not even counting the gajillions of swatches I want to post of all the Israeli brand polishes I have!

Logo!

So I decided that it's high time for me to create a logo for my brand- or whatever it is, I have a name, I might as well make a logo. I doubt I'll ever become well known enough for it to matter, but at least this way I'll have a signature "thing" to stick on the jewelry I sell and make people remember me. Obviously, since I'm "Fedora Harp", those are the two items that it has to contain, but I didn't want to make something too busy or two over-drawn, so I had to try and make it as simple as possible. The stuff I'm putting up now is basically a cartoon-y version of what is actually sitting in my room as we speak, but I'm also thinking of making the picture mainly a fedora hat, with the harp sitting where a feather would be. I have to get better at drawing hats for that to work, though, because the angle that I'm capable of drawing right now isn't really good for this kind of thing.

If anyone actually comments (who hasn't gotten here from LJ and already saw it there), I'd love to see what people think.



I finally settled on one of these two, but I'm still not sure which. Of course it could be that once I finish the version where it's a larger hat with a harp on it, I'll like that better than either of these, but this is what I've got for now.

Yay, pictures!

Hi there! I took some pictures of stuff I made today. Some of it is new, some of it is quite old. The truth is, these pictures are going up more to work on my photography than my jewelry. I'll have to take a lot of photos in order to get better at it. I'll tell you a little about each piece as it goes up.

I tried to take everything in natural lighting, but when I put stuff directly in the sunlight, except for a few exceptions, it was so full of glare as to be unusable. Next I tried slightly off to the side, in the shade, and that seemed to work- except that I had to position myself and my camera so as not to block any more light than necessary. Flash is completely out of the question, of course, but in one picture I accidentally forgot to shut off flash and it came out ok. The other times that I left the flash on came out pretty much terrible.

I took all of these on the floor in the living room, right near our picture-window, but hopefully you won't be able to tell...

This was the only picture I took in direct sunlight that I thought was good enough to post. I made these earrings about two years ago, using a slightly experimental technique- I won't repeat the exact process again because it came out a little clumsy, but I've used similar ideas with later projects.

This is one of the first pairs of earrings I made- about three years ago? They've been handled pretty roughly, you can see it a little. I wore them almost on a daily basis for awhile, and then I would transport them around in a rough bag with things like safety pins and other scratchy items. I need to take better care of them! I took two pictures becuase I was trying out different display techniques. Actually, I took several dozen pictures of the same earrings in different setups and lighting schemes, but I liked these two the best.

This is the necklace half of a set that I made for my friend's birthday [note: soothing_sight, for those of you who know her]. For some reason all of the pictures of this set came out kind of blurry- probably becuase there was no flash. I need to find a better way to steady my hands while I snap the picture. I'm sending this off in two weeks, so I'd better hurry up and get better shots! This is my first attempt at making a necklace that involves crimping beads and this kind of chain (it's not Tigertail. What is this stuff called? Help?)

Here are the matching earrings. I'm not going to bother enlarging the picture becuase it came out pretty awful. In person they are really nice though!

This is both of them together- for some reason this one is less blurry.

Three small bangles that I made- originally there were eight of varying shades of this color- beer? What color is it?, but I lost the other five. I'd love more of these beads, I used to wear all of them at one and they matched practically everything. They would be too small on anyone else, because I made them for me and I have really tiny wrists. Regular bracelets fall right off of me.

The next four pictures are two necklaces displayed with and without some decorations, I can't decide if the decorations are worth it or if they distract from the necklace itself. Opinions would be helpful! My mom thinks that the decorations add something, I think they kind of draw your eye away from the point.


This is the first necklace I've ever made in this kind of ropey style- I kept it for myself. Since then I've made quite a few of them as gifts for various people, and I've wanted to try this with a thinner rope and smaller stones, but I haven't been able to afford a spool of thinner rope yet. I have also experimented with different starting techniques as opposed to a net that covers the whole stone, but this one seems like it's the sturdiest and the stone will never fall out. I'll keep experimenting though, see if I can come up with or find something that displays more of the texture of the stone.


My parents originally commissioned this one as a gift for someone, but it was deemed too chunky, so I kept it for myself and made a more delicate one for the gift recipient. I have a picture of that one somewhere, but it's not such a great quality shot. I'll probably post it at some point though, along with some other old pictures of jewelry that I don't have anymore.

I made a Tigertail necklace today that's supposed to sit right on the neck, but since I have a really small neck it doesn't. I'm trying to figure out a graceful way to display it. I'm making more stuff every day so hopefully this little picspam will be the first of many!

I'd love to hear your thoughts, dear nonexistent readers :-)