November's Here!

November....the month of Bonfire Night, Toffee Apples, stunning colours in the trees and frosty mornings! I love this time of year!

From a gemstone point of view, we have the lovely Topaz and Citrine as this month's birthstones.  The poem above indicates that Topaz is an "amber hue" but the truth is that Topaz comes in many different colours including shades of blue and pink.

More to come on those beautiful gemstones over the coming month.  If you are a November baby, or know someone who is, and would like to commission a special piece of jewellery featuring one of these lovelies, then drop me a line via the "Contact" page.

Tool Tuesday!

Go into any jeweller’s workshop and you will find a treasure trove of tools!  Some easily identifiable, such as a piercing saw and files, others look downright strange!  I thought I would introduce you to a few of the tools I use pretty much every day to create the jewellery you see on these pages.

The first one isn’t technically a tool but I couldn’t work without it.  I bought my workbench about 3 years ago from a jeweller in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, along with some lovely old second-hand tools…..I love second-hand tools! (More about those in another post)

Workbenches are taller than you might think, when sat down the bench should be at roughly chest height so that you can work without bending over and giving yourself a bad back!  The front edge has a semi-circle cut out so you can sit close to the work with a bench “peg”.  The peg is a slightly sloped piece of wood that jewellers cut a “V” into as well as other notches as grooves that support the piece while I work on it.  

Suspended underneath the cut-out is a bench “skin” that catches all those pesky bits that I drop as well as all the silver and gold dust that is filed from pieces and makes it very sparkly!

So this is where my day, as well as some evenings and occasionally a night, looking out of the window at the garden with a naughty kitten curled up in the bench skin and a couple of big dogs acting as draft excluders by the door…...and I love it.