Sticker Love

We continue to be full of love for all our stickers - have you seen the latest offering?

19mm stickers on our new round lockets.

The cherries are my favourite.

16mm squares on our square cufflink fittings, which now come in all colours!

Super cute pendants made with our stickers - these come in a new size: 20.5mm.

Adorable, huh?  We only have these new locket rings in limited quantities - be quick!  New size of sticker to sit on top: 13mm.

Ah, my favourite - a quirky key ring for the home, made with our big hearts and a resin sticker.  We don't have any pretty keys to our house so the key above is a jewellery charm!

Have fun everyone!!  :D

Fun in the Sun

This week I took my craft kit to the garden - such a treat!  Can you guess what these are?

No?

Yes!  That's right!  Earrings!!  Tiny little earrings made with nail polish over the back of the glass!

They look so pretty in real life, and I could not get over how quick they were to make.  Just grab some nail polish, apply a couple of coats to the back of the glass, let it dry, glue on an earstud fitting, and away you go!   I used:

• our teeny 8mm glass
• any old nail polish (not sure if quality makes any difference here - mine are all high-street brands and have worked well)
• e6000 glue (again, I was not sure if this would peel off the nail varnish from the glass, but nope, it's a good secure bond)
• and our 4mm earstud fittings with pad.

Have a lovely weekend!!

Fab New Buttons Now In!

We have just received a shipment of fabulous new self-cover buttons in lots of sizes: from a diddy 12mm on to 15mm, 19mm, 22mm, 28mm, 38mm all the way to a huge 45mm! See them all here: http://www.jasminstudiocrafts.com/category/jewellery-buttons

These 38mm beauties fit perfectly inside our 38mm trays!

And this is a 12mm button inside a 12mm ring bezel

And for the other sizes, findings with a pad are ideal.... 

...see?

Really easy to make.  And you can choose between flat backs or wire backs, with or without making tool, so you only need to buy the tool once for each size. Try them and be hooked!

Make Your Own Buttons!

Add a new creative twist to your jewellery with our lovely button making kits now available in the shop. 

You start with two pieces of metal and end up with a beautiful button that is covered in the fabric of your choice.  The buttons are available in a choice of sizes, 15mm and 22mm:

and two versions:  flat back and wire back. 

The flat back buttons are ideal for gluing onto rings, earrings, hair pins and pendant findings, and the wire back buttons are perfect for stringing and for threading onto hairbands. 

These buttons come with a making tool for assembling your buttons (each size of button needs a different tool, but different backs can be used with the same tool as long as the size of button is the same).

To make your pretty buttons just pick some fabric – thin fabric is best – and cut a circle that’s about 1-1.5cm wider than your button.
 

Pop the fabric onto the white part of the tool, pattern-side facing down, and sit your button over this, ensuring that any pattern is centered in the position you want it to be (this can sometimes be a bit tricky!).  Then, with the red bit of the tool, press down into the white bit so that the fabric and button top are snug inside the white part of the tool.  

Bunch the fabric back into the button 

place the back of the button on top, ensuring it is perfectly centered

 and with the red bit of the tool again press down hard so that it fits right inside the button. 

Finally, pop the button out of the tool, and there you go, a perfect button that you have made yourself!

If you have chosen to use flat back buttons, you can simply glue these into place onto rings and hairpins or simply add a magnet, pin or tiny brooch back.  

To use them with pendant trays, you may have to apply your glue to the edge of the button rather than to the metal back.  This is because there is a 1-2mm edge where the button sides are higher than the back, so sometimes you may have to add a riser so that the back is flush with the edge so for certain applications this would be useful.  You can use a rubber pad, washer, or a foam sticker (as used in card-making) – just ensure your glue is a strong one.

I have used a small riser on the hairclips above, however for items such as rings and hairpins, a riser should not be necessary.

The 15mm flat backs fit beautifully into our 15mm bezel trays, and we are investigating offering 22mm trays.

The wire back buttons have a loop at the back so that these are essentially your traditional buttons and these can certainly be used as such!  Or you can also add them to hairbands – all you need to do is thread the elastic (doubled up) into the loop, and then knot it over itself.  Simple!  And if you use the metal fastening on the elastic at the back of the button you will have a secure tie and the metal won’t show.  See pictures below for a guide:

                                                                                                                

The best fabrics to use are thinner ones, cottons and linens are ideal.  Look at Japanese fabrics for beautiful designs that are little enough to use on a button, or the tiny patterns available in dollshouse shops, or use just a little detail from a bigger pattern fabric. 

If you want to be totally original, consider printing your own fabric – I usually use heat-transfer paper (for printing on t-shirts) for my own designs.  

Most of the above buttons use vintage images from my collection which I have printed onto heat transfer paper, and bonded to thin fabric.  Or if you wanted to do this on a slightly bigger scale, consider using a fabric-printing company who will print short-runs of fabric for you to your design.

The use of fabric lends a wonderful handcrafted feel to your jewellery, whether classy or cutesy, it’s very pretty indeed!

Pyrography Is Not For Me...

Having recently added the wooden tiles to the range, and already having rather a lot of equipment from my other life - I figured I should absolutely try pyrography, the art of burning a beautiful design onto wood.  Well, I can sort of draw, and I'm pretty deft with a torch, so I figured it should be easy.  

Easy?? Yeah, right.

This is one of my smaller torches, my trusty little dremel Versatip.  It comes with various attachments that I can't figure out, so I generally just use it as an open flame - however, it has a nifty tip for pyrography.

One-handed-switch-on and off I go sintering away...

 I'm resting on two soldering sheets over a floor tile over an Ikea table!

 

By this point I was already worried - it is harder than it looks to hold the torch steady, and despite the fine point I was sinking into the wood faster than I could move it!

Result - a pig's ear.  That's meant to be a "J" surrounded by tasteful swirls, but I think I really can spy an actual pig's ear.

I'd need more practice, but probably a thousand years of practice couldn't change a bad pyrographer, so that's, regretfully, another one I'll leave to the experts I think.

....Or at least until the would-be conqueror in me pushes me to try it *just* one more time.

Then I can have a matching set of pig's ear-rings!  oink oink!  :)

Tieta Loves Cheese - A Tutorial on Magnets

My Tieta Carme loves her cheese.  Tieta, is Catalan for an auntie, a familiar form derived from the word 'tia' (aunt), connoting that she is someone that you are quite close to.   I am.

It was always a family ritual that when any one of us went away somewhere far from home we would bring back a souvenir for everyone, and she got either cheese or make up, but usually cheese.  Even when I was quite small and used to come to London as an unaccompanied minor with my red Iberia bib bag with all my worldly paperwork stuffed into it, I remember going back with a selection of British cheeses for her...   In those days when I was the souvenir recipient I was much keener to get the odd airport toy or sheet of stickers myself, but now I have moved to the cheese side, and I totally get her.  

I recently discovered that there's a universe full of people out there who collect vintage French or Swiss cheese labels for fun.  Well I jumped onto that bandwagon sooner than you can say reblochon, and found a wonderful seller of quirky graphics, Harmonica Godlfish who had just the images I had in mind. Do check out the shop - it is pretty magical. 

So in honour of my favourite tieta, I made some cheese label magnets to adorn her fridge.

Resizing the images to fit the 25mm trays was a bit of a technical pain in the proverbial, but we got there.  I printed out a sheet full, and cut them to size using a craft punch.  Then I coated the images with a bit of hairspray (here Sainsbury's value range, cheap as chips).  They were laser prints on good thick paper and I was going to be using epoxy resin stickers, so not crazily worried about the inks running here, but still.  One precaution won't hurt.

When dry, I glued the self adhesive epoxy stickers over the top of the images.

I had already cut the images and centering the sticker correctly was nowhere as difficult as I'd envisaged (normally I stick first and then cut the image around the sticker).

Then I ModPodged some blank cabochon settings, and popped the domed images into those, wiping away any excess out of the sides.

Inspect your work.  Be pleased at how pretty it turns out.  My fingers were stained from a previous project, I do normally wash my hands but that black paint proved a nightmare to clean.  Thank the world of science for surgical spirit which removed most of the mess!

I have recently come across some fantastic self-adhesive neodymium magnets, which means they are very strong, but they come with an equally strong sticker that you just peel off and attach to wherever you need.  They will be in the shop shortly. 

And they went onto the backs with a pretty neat finish (unlike every other time I have used glue and made a humongous mess of the backs)

I like the way they click together...

Hey, I'm easily amused.  Even now I can still have great fun with a magnet, much like my five year old does.

Magnets are finished.  I love these so much, I'm going to make a set for myself.  And maybe for all my cheese loving friends, and perhaps for an ex-boss I am still in touch with, whom we used to call 'le grand fromage'.  Apt, methinks. 

But these, these are for tieta.  x