Need Wedding Photos?

Are you located in the UK? Then give a thought to hiring Celynnen Photography. They're based in North Wales but can work all over. My friends Ioan and Nicki have a wonderful photography business and their photographs are incredible. They do all kinds of work, special photos for a birthday? A graduation? If you want professional photos then these are the people to call. This special team will make sure that you are thrilled with your photographs.

http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/

Global Anchor Anne-Marie Mediwake

Well, Anne-Marie Mediwake of Global TV Ontario wore the necklace that I designed today. Was happy to see that it looked really good on air. Here's a couple of pictures to show you how she looked wearing it. Had to get co-anchor Leslie Roberts in one of the pictures :-)

Busy Weekend

Well, I was busy, busy, busy this weekend. Headed out to one of my favourite bead shops on Queen St. West in Toronto. It's called Arton Beads. They've got a great selection of stones and are quite friendly. Also picked up a set of transfer punches to use as mandrels for making jumprings. Much cheaper than buying mandrels marketed to jewelry designers and they do the same job.


Went home and started coming up with some new pieces. My first was made with tourmaline beads, a necklace and earrings set. Tourmaline are great beads, such varied colours so they'll go with almost anything in your wardrobe.

I managed to make up three new necklaces and six pairs of earrings. Need to get more done to add to the stock at my store www.lasuzcreations.etsy.com

So much to do, so little time....

Trial and Tribulations of Jumprings

Well, I had my first attempt at making jumprings using a saw. I think that it is not the way to go for me as my hand started cramping up, and it was only a coil a few inches long. Will probably go a more automated route in making the jumprings and use a cutter.

I did tumble the jumprings that did make the grade, and didn't have excess saw cuts on them. They came up nice and shiny :-) Am so happy I purchased the tumbler, it makes such a difference to the look of your sterling silver. Made up a few earwires while I was at it and tumbled them too. Also managed to make up four new pairs of earrings and hope to post those soon. The unfortunate thing is my good camera has gone on the blink :-( Not sure what the problem is but I will have to take it in and have it looked at. I really don't want to be purchasing a new camera just yet.

Sold a rose and clear quartz necklace to the other day. She's a co-anchor on Global TV's Newshour at 6 pm. She's promised to let me take a photo of her on the anchor desk when she's wearing it so I can post it on here.

Have just ordered business cards so hope to have those in a few weeks to hand out.

Shaggy Loops

I just added some new items to my Etsy store http://www.lasuzcreations.etsy.com/ and a couple were made with the chainmaille style called Shaggy Loops.

It's a cute, fun style and I jazzed up one of the pairs of earrings that I created with Swarovski crystal Cosmic squares. I'm such a big fun of the Cosmic line, have used the squares and circles in a few items and I have more ideas up my sleeve.

Stay tuned!

I rule my domain!

Well, after reading a forum posting about purchasing your domain names in case you want them for future use, and to stop others purchasing them, I now have http://www.lasuzcreations.com/ and http://www.lasuzcreations.ca/ I have redirected both to my shop on http://www.etsy.com/ which is http://www.lasuzcreations.etsy.com/

Maybe at some point my sales will be high enough that I'll be able to start selling from one or both of those sites. I really hope so :-)

Tumbling, Sawing and Polishing

Well, I've decided that instead of spending so much money buying the sterling silver jump rings that I've been using in creating chainmaille jewelry, that I should bite the bullet, buy the equipment needed and make my own.

The wonderful people on the community forum at http://www.etsy.com/ were great in helping answer some of the questions that I had about saws and blades. I've now purchased the saw, blades and tumbler. The tumbler is what you use to polish up your jewelry after you've made it. It also gives a lovely shine and makes it look great!

The only problem with making chainmaille jewelry is that it requires math! Yuck, thought I'd managed to leave math equations behind me so many years ago in high school. I am very thankful that so many people have posted advice about the aspect ration of jumprings so that I have an idea what of what to. One of the contributors on the etsy forum, Karen Hung, actually pointed me to an article in Step By Step Wire Jewelry, a magazine, that she had written and that spells out, in fairly simple terms, how to determine aspect ration. Basically, in order to create certain chainmaille designs you have to have the right sized ring or they just won't be strong enough to hold the jewelry together. You need to know the interior diameter (ID) and the width of the wire you are using (WD) to find AR. A variation of those will help you find what you need if you already have a pattern in mind. Of course, I keep running into problems when the pattern is in metric and I know linear or vice versa. Some patterns suggest ID of 1/4 and my measurement is in mm. The conversion is a right pain in the butt! And to throw more confusion into the mix, the United States and Canada use different wire gauges for wire, AWG and SWG. I could go on and on about the insaneness of it all but I'll restrain myself.

The only other thing I still need to purchase are more mandrels for making different sized jump rings as I only have even numbered ones at the moment. The expenses continue!