Happy 2017 from Caprilicious Jewellery

Hello folks, nice to touch base with you again. I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and Santa was kind to you. We had a quiet one with a couple of friends and we consumed more calories than we normally do in a month. And soon it will be 2017 - hasn't this year just flown by? It seems to me that it was only a short time ago that I was in India and now I will be packing my cases all over again.

I'm only playing this for you because I love the song, it is so catchy - in an act of genius Apple are using it in their latest ad for the MacBook Pro. Enjoy!

With my belly full of food, snoozing like a replete python seemed to be the order of the day. I did play with clay for a while, but my heart wasn't truly in it. I tried to remake the hibiscus I broke last week, but fo some reason I couldn't bring myself to finish the flower, eventually running out of bronze clay and doing a bit of shopping online to replenish my stocks. 
 I made a little flower pendant and because the petals were shorter than the hibiscus it was infinitely easier to put together. I fired it in the stainless steel pan adding carbon on top once the first firing was done, instead of firing it first on a steel mesh and then moving it to the pan. I didn't want it to meet the same fate as my hibiscus. 

You can see the charcoal still glowing from being heated to 500 degrees C. The two other charms are a little trial of a new bronze clay just to see if it fires well. This method ensures that the pieces are not handled between firings, hoping to reduce the chances of accidental heartbreak!

The next morning I crept down to the conservatory even before I had my first cup of tea and OMG, my kiln shelf had cracked right down the middle! However, when I took the pan out of the kiln and scrabbled about in the carbon, the three pieces of bronze had survived unscathed, and looked rather nice, although one of the Sunny bronze charms had shrunk a bit more than the other.
 

Colour Me Beautiful

Because I am addicted to colour, Caprilicious Jewellery is as a consequence colourful and highly visible. I take any opportunity to add  a bit of vibrancy to my jewellery and soutache and seed beads have been a fabulous way of achieving this. Seed beads and braids are easily portable and I've been able to sit in front of the telly, sewing away all evening.
I thought I'd make a couple of pendants strung on torque necklaces this week - little projects that weren't terribly time consuming and seemed ideal for a week of festivity.

With the two I made this week, I now have three of these little pendants on non tarnish enamelled copper wire torque necklaces. I really like making the necklaces - they are very strong, thick wire, moulded and hammered into shape. The pendants can be slipped off and the torques used on their own, or with other danglers.

That's me for this week, and this year, folks. See you again in 2017, same time, same place.
Happy New Year to you all, take care and stay safe
​xx