My new toy

For Christmas, Santa left me an interesting little gadget. As I happen to love gadgets, I had fun exploring this one.

Over the past several months, I’ve complained ad nauseum about not being able to find consistently made jump rings. It’s rather painful to be partway through some great project, run out of rings, get the exact same rings form somewhere you’ve bought them from repeatedly…and discover that something has change.

I’ve run into everything from rings measured across the wrong diameter to a company deciding they want to reinvent traditional gauge settings.

It’s been so frustrating that I’ve almost walked out on knitting chains, which is what originally brought me into serious jewelry design.

Santa must have heard my cries, because my new gadget is a travel-sized jump ring maker! There are four mandrels (that I still need to measure) and a weird shaped hand-crank base. As long as wire companies remain consistent with their wire gauges, I’m set!

I can hardly wait to give it a try!

Customers as audience

My mom once worked in a restaurant where she had to do her work right in front of people walking in. I then volunteered in a museum where the paleo lab was lined with windows so people could watch them from the dinosaur exhibit.

There’s a bit of fascination in watching people work. In a way, we enjoy it because we feel like we’re being let in on the secret. We get to see how it’s all done. Then again, for certain professions, it really ruins the mystery.

Most days, I feel that way about jewelry design. I spent a couple of months as a demonstrator for a craft store. Twice a week, I sat behind a box of crates and made jewelry. Not the worst way to pick up some extra bucks, but being on display like that made me feel more like a performance artist and less like a jewelry designer.

It was great to watch people marvel at pieces I’d completed, or to have them ask me about the various pieces on my table. But someone would invariably walk in right as I forgot how to do something, and there I’d be with my nose stuck in a book. Sadly, rather than seeing me as a resourceful woman who wasn’t afraid to rely on a book now and then, they would ask me in a rather disdainful tone how long I’d been making jewelry.

Honestly, they had no business looking down their nose at me for looking up the answer to a question when they couldn’t even string a bead onto string; and I had no business feeling guilty for showing off my status as a learner when I needed to know how to do something. Truth be told, we’re all learners, regardless of how long we’ve done something, or how proficiently we do it. The master has as much to learn as the novice, especially in light of trying to stay current or to be innovative in the field.

It’s hard to be the one being watched…but there’s so much to learn as both the watched and the watching.

An unusual source for components

I decided to make goblet tags for some people’s Christmas presents this year, hoping that the smaller projects would inspire me to bigger things…or to at least get back to my regular design schedule.

I wandered into the local craft store’s scrapbooking section (which honestly takes up a larger portion of the store than every section except floral, framing, and knitting) looking for cards and stamps to create nice display cards for the tags.

This was a mistake for far too many reasons.

The first was that I couldn’t find any stamps I liked, so the white cards I found ended up being plain. The second was that i lost some time trying to find a punch that could handle just creating an outline of half a circle. I seriously think such a thing must exist! (Actually, I think I should stop the insanity and find a supplier for display cards.)

The third was the clincher. There are nifty components that work well, or would work well, if they were turned into jewelry components. Seriously! I found little metal stamps that ended up becoming a couple of sets of goblet tags because they were just too cute to be wated on any scrapbooking project!

This means that future trips to the craft store for jewelry components or inspiration are going to have to include a stroll through the scrapbooking area. Even worse…there’s a scrapbooking store in the same shopping center as my workplace.

This could be dangerous!