Are you in North Carolina and want to see Shore Debris in person? My jewelry is available at this Sanford location:

Divine Designs by Nancy, 92 Amarillo Ln

You can also find my jewelry in this Southwest Florida gallery:

Elizabet Bryant Art Gallery, 200 West Dearborn Street, Englewood, FL 34223

Saturday, April 14, 2012

New Jewelry Book

I bought this book: Mixed Metal Mainia: Solder, rivet, hammer, and wire exceptional jewelry by Kim St. Jean. I love it! It is by far the best investment in jewelry books I have ever purchased. It has gotten me over my hump in moving from just wire work and into metalsmithing.Mixed Metal Mania by Kim St. Jean It was more than a year ago that I took a metalsmithing boot camp class at Ornamentea, and I went out and bought all of the tools and materials necessary to begin metalsmithing in my own home. But they just sat there... I would look at everything from time to time, and was truthfully unsure of where I should start and unsure of myself and my skills.



Kim's book is written at my level - I've already read it cover to cover three times and have completed project 1, a rather simple, but stylish cigar band ring.


Lucky for me, I have my own jewelry collection that always needs more pieces and friends/family that love an experimental piece as a gift. I decided to do three rings (just for extra practice) - one for me, one for a sister, and one for a friend :

Paper Ring Templates

I taped them down to my scrap piece of nickel silver (the left over piece from my class at Ornamentea).




Cigar Band Rings in Progress After a couple of hours, I had them all sawed out. Mine was complete - I stamped "V"s on one side and "C"s on the other with "&"s going down the middle. The part that wasn't stamped, I used my ball peen hammer to add texture. My husband thought having out initials on the ring was a cute idea. I still had lots of work to do on Lauren's and Betsy's.

Cigar Band Rings in ProgressI decided that I did not like the "&"s down the middle, so I did Lauren's without those. Betsy and her husband have the same first initial, so I just stamped the "B"s all over the center of hers which ended up being my favorite one.

Finished Cigar Band Rings made by Vicky Brown of Shore DebrisI'm ready for the next project!

2 comments:

Miss Val's Creations said...

Beautiful work! I would love to get into metalsmithing one of these days. Spare time is always an issue! I look forward to seeing your future metal creations. :)

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