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Thursday 31 January 2013

Wedding dress jewellery and flower cufflinks

I made a blog post recently about preserving wedding flowers into jeweller and other gifts. This was a result of a wedding flower I was asked to preserve within a paperweight. Following on from that blog I have been asked to make a few other wedding and flower related items of jewellery so thought I would show them off.

Wedding dress pendants

Firstly I received some beautiful wedding dress lace material and was asked to encase it within pendants and earrings for the bride and her guests. The red lace material was beautiful, really vibrant and great to work with. The bride wanted all the pendants to be oval in shape and a matching set of earrings. Luckily I was able to use some of the whole flowers from the material and they were a perfect fit for the pendants.

Wedding lace material pendant
Wedding lace material pendant


 ...and using the smaller flowers for the earrings, the smaller flowers were again a perfect fit for the size of the oval earrings I made.

Wedding dress material earrings and necklace
Wedding dress material earrings and necklace


Real flower cufflinks

This was a different custom order but still flower themed. The flower petals that I received were taken from a rose that was used for a proposal 21 years ago. For the first set of cufflinks I created miniature petals and set them within sterling silver cufflinks.

Real rose petal cufflinks
Real rose petal cufflinks


And for the second set of cufflinks I used some broken fragments of the petals and created a nice effect.

Flower petal cufflinks
Flower petal cufflinks


The couple were celebrating 21 years since he proposed to her this week and these cufflinks were being given to the gentleman as a lovely gift.

Mick

Wednesday 16 January 2013

How to preserve flowers

I really love making my paperweights at the moment for people and I am being asked to preserve some quite unusual items. Usually the items I am working with are larger than those used when making my jewellery so use different techniques. In the past I have had quite a few requests for preserving wedding flowers and flowers from other special occasions within my jewellery. Obviously these need to be small enough to fit within the designs that I have available which can often limit the flower types that I can use.

Here is an example of a pendant that I made containing a selection of small wedding flowers last year:

Real flower necklace - Necklace made with preserved wedding flowers
Real flower necklace


I still have a great deal of fun making jewellery containing flowers however the paperweights have now allowed me to preserve much larger flowers. The paperweights can be made in a few different shapes and sizes to accommodate most flower types and I can also incorporate other objects.

This paperweight was a custom order completed last week and is my first paperweight made to preserve whole wedding flowers.

Wedding flower paperweight - Paperweight made with preserved wedding flowers
Wedding flower paperweight


To be honest my wife doesn’t like being bought flowers. I think we both agree in that they don’t last very long and it isn’t very nice watching them die; she would much rather be bought a living plant. At least now we have the option on the rare occasion that she is bought flowers that I can always preserve one or two of them within a paperweight! With St Valentine’s Day just around the corner it could also be quite useful!

Mick