Personalised Horse Hair Jewellery

I thought I would blog a little about my horse hair jewellery, mainly because I haven’t mentioned it for a while and I am currently making quite a lot of it! I really do love working with horse and pony hair, not only because of the great sentimental value for the owner but also because of the fantastic effects that can be achieved from it.

Would you believe that the horse hair pendants that have the criss-cross effect that I make take between five and seven days to complete. The pendant is built up in four layers and I individually place each hair in turn, creating a three-dimensional effect by having several strands of horse hair on each layer.

I have quite often been asked to make my resin horse hair jewellery a little bit more personalised for the horse and owner. This has sometimes been quite a challenge but very rewarding.

Sometimes I colour the horse hair pendant to represent the horses cross county colours or stable colours:


I have also included other small items to the jewellery such as flowers or tiny confetti stars:


On other occasions I have even included glitter and seed beads to give the horse hair jewellery a totally different look:


Sometimes I am asked to include the horse’s name with the jewellery. This has previously been achieved by having a separate silver charm engraved with the name or even engraved onto my silver pendants themselves.

But a recent blog post about my Photo Jewellery gave me the idea of including the horse’s name within the pendant itself, and this has been quite popular. Obviously I am restricted to the number of characters I can have but so far I have been lucky! I use the silver or gold peel-offs to represent the name and it really does look lovely and three-dimensional suspended within the pendant.


So there is my latest array of horse hair jewellery, complete with colour, names and other items to make it a little bit more personalised to the horse and owner, I hope you like it!

If you would like to see more examples of my horse and pony jewellery please visit my horse hair jewellery website page.

Mick

My Favourite Flowers & Real Flower Jewellery

I hope everyone is enjoying all this lovely weather that we have been experiencing. On a personal note, I think it has made me realise that I am a winter kind of guy! It must be all the years of living on a Narrowboat but I much prefer a cold winter’s day. I loved snuggling up in front of the wood-burning stove and having the towpaths to ourselves and then taking the boat out breaking through the ice (and not having to avoid hire-boats filled with drunken boaters having very little respect for nature and other people).

Apart from the overcrowded and litter strewn country parks and the smell of half-cooked meat drifting over from next door’s barbeque, a warm spring day does have some lovely points for me. Nature comes to life after having a rest over the winter months. Baby animals are born and beautiful flowers start to appear in celebration.

A couple of days ago my daughter asked me ‘what is my favourite flower?’ Without question I answered the following; so in no particular order my three favourite flowers are...

1) The Daisy

Such a simple and innocent flower that speaks volumes to me about what summer time is all about. Sitting in a meadow making daisy chains is my idea of a lovely day out.


2) Forget-me-nots

Beautiful flowers that I am happy to seed all over the garden if they want too! I also like for folklore and legends behind the flowers (especially the one about the knight who picked a posy of flowers whilst walking with his lady, fell into the river, started to drown and threw the posy to his lady shouting “Forget-me-not”.


3) The Dandelion

A flower that looks like a ball of sunshine, the Dandelion has its rightful place in my top three flowers...I really resent mowing the lawn when I see them growing out of the grass.


So they are my top three flowers, I would love to hear what your favourite flowers are?

You may remember that last year I produced a few pendants and necklaces containing real flowers. Well, this year I have quite a few planned and have already started to press flowers in readiness for some new items of jewellery...in fact I am now taking a small flower press with me whenever I go out!


If you would like to see some of the real flower jewellery that I made over the last year, please visit my real flower jewellery website page.

Personalised Photo Jewellery – 21st Birthday Gifts

Hi all, I haven’t really planned anything to blog about this week so I thought I would show off a custom jewellery order that I completed last week. I was asked to make some pieces of personalised photo jewellery for a lady to give as a gift to her sister for her 21st birthday.

The request was for a pair of earrings containing photographs of her sister as a baby and a more recent shot. And this is what I came up with; the photographs have been set within sterling silver oval -shaped pendant bezels on sterling silver fishhook earrings.

...and this is how I made them; I took the digital photograph and scaled it down to suit the size of the pendant. I then took a template of the pendant and removed the unwanted area surrounding the oval.

I then superimposed the oval shaped photograph over a photograph of the silver pendant bezel and sent it to the customer for approval.

The photograph was then printed and cut, placed within the pendant bezel and sealed with resin, creating a slight domed effect with the resin over the pendant. I also made this personalised pendant for her which was again a sterling silver pendant bezel with 21st encased inside with resin. I actually used letter peel-offs, the kind you use for card making to form the ‘21st’ and it is very effective and an unusual birthday gift for the young lady.

To further personalise the pendant and earrings I engraved the back of each item with a different message, engraving the phrases ‘Happy 21st Birthday’, ‘11th March 2011’ and ‘Love Eva & Hannah’ onto the backs of the jewellery.

If you would like to find out more about my photo jewellery, how it is made and the types of jewellery that I offer, please visit my personalised photo jewellery website page.

My new rainbow peelable window decoration

Last week I was extremely lucky to win a blog giveaway by Ali’s Craft Studio and I got to choose one of her wonderful handmade peelable window decorations, and it has just arrived!

Although I was spoilt for choice when looking around her website, the window decoration that really did beckon me was her ‘rainbow and cloud’ decoration. It is lovely and bright and happy; I have always had a big thing about rainbows and have many dotted around house in various places. Recently I spent some time looking through my old primary school pictures to find the majority of them I had drawn a rainbow!

So the question is where do I put my new rainbow?

Do I put it in the rather dull bathroom to brighten up the tiles?


... or do I put it onto the mirrored wardrobe doors in the bedroom? (hehe just noticed teddy has his head in the clouds).

... I think for now I will put it on our front room window so that every time I look out I can see a rainbow in the sky.




The beauty about Ali’s peelable window decorations is that they are moveable, so whenever I want a change I can do just that. Having said that I might just go and purchase a few more so that I can have rainbows all over the house and car!

Please go and have a look at the handmade peelable window decorations made by Ali on her website.