Next week is Thanksgiving, and with it comes Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Stay tuned for some flash sales!

Awhile back, I made a picture tutorial on how to make ear cuffs. Amazingly, it has been my most popular blog post to date!

I've had several people write to ask questions about how to do certain steps, and I felt that a video tutorial would probably be helpful!

The video is embedded below, but if you can't get the embedded video to work, here's the link!


Here's the picture tutorial for how to make a simple ear cuff. I also have tutorials on making a swirly ear cuff which can have interchangeable dangles and a double-loop swirl ear cuff!

I started with a sheet of solid 18 ga copper and drew the designs I wanted to make with Sharpie.


The next step was sawing out all the individual pieces, bit by bit, completely by hand. 


I managed to break three saw blades and then break the fragments which I was still using to saw. I'm not particularly proud of that; my sawing technique needs a lot of help.

The bench pin I am working at is made out of pine. I simply cut out a v-notch and clamped it to my workbench. The yellow and black thing you see on the right of the picture is beeswax. I originally bought it for my pysanky egg-decorating, but it works pretty well for conditioning the saw blades.


At this point the pieces looked like this. (For those who don't get the reference, "OKAY" is an important line in The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The movie just came out and, of course, my cheeks turned into rivers and the shoulders of my tshirt into overtaxed sponges. The story is so sad and so beautiful.)


Next, I etched the designs.

Sharpie works as a resist, so everywhere that I drew with Sharpie remained raised and everywhere else got eaten away by the Ferric Chloride acid. After soaking the copper in the acid bath I neutralized it in a solution of baking soda and warm water. To be on the safe side, after that, I dusted pure baking soda onto the dried-off copper and rinsed it off.


Copper looks like this after etching. It's not much until you attack it with steel wool.


You can't imagined out relieved and excited I was that this actually worked well!

The raised designs weren't very obvious, so the next step was oxidizing the metal!

I used my metal/leather hole puncher to punch the pieces (so I could string them on thin copper wire so  they wouldn't be so difficult to remove from the acid bath-- I learned that the hard way with the ferric chloride) and, wearing gloves, thoroughly scrubbed the pieces to remove debris and fingerprint oils.

(Fixing a the broken schnozzel for my hole puncher wasn't fun. I mostly bring this up because I love the word schnozzel. SCHNOZZEL.)


Then I prepared a Liver of Sulfur bath. This stuff smells like... well, sulfur. The rotten-egg variety of sulfur scent, to be more accurate. BLECH.


After neutralizing and cleaning, the copper is basically just black. Then I begin the process of very gently brushing with steel wool and polishing with three different grades of sandpaper. After a while, the raised designs are shiny and the recesses are dark brown or black (depending on how long I had them in the LOS).


Next, I filed and then sanded the edges. Sawing metal can create lots of nicks. You definitely don't want them catching on your skin, so I file every single edge. The sanding is to create a smooth, even shine on the surface of the copper.


Some of the pieces required more sawing at this point. The Celtic trinity knot was saw pierced, a process that lets me meticulously cut shapes out of the inside of a metal design. The new edges were filed and sanded, too.

I then used a spray called ProtectaClear (a body-salt resistant resin) to seal the oxidation and ensure that the nice polished raised designs won't naturally oxidize over time.

(Raw copper pieces-- like all of the copper wireworking I've done in the past-- naturally reacts with oxygen and turns dark brown over several months. A gently scrub with vinegar brings back the fresh, shiny copper).

One of the best things about the spray is that is keeps your skin from turning green! The greenness is not actually an allergic reaction, as I was taught growing up. It actually is a chemical reaction very akin to oxidation (the reason that pennies turn brown then green) and is just a buildup of molecules that washes right off the skin with soap. It's never a fun thing to deal with, though, which is why I am so fond of this spray. It's nontoxic, don't worry. :)


I used a dapping block on this small pendent to dome one of the pieces.

I haven't finished it yet but I'm doing another piece that is purely saw work with no etching or oxidizing.


The next several hours were spent doing techniques I am far more familiar with: beading and wireworking.

The results?



This "Mischief Managed" bracelet is inspired by the Marauder's Map in "Harry Potter" and has chainmaille in Gryffindor colors.



 Medieval Swirl Hair Fork-- the front design was inspired by some circular knotwork I saw in some medieval manuscripts I was studying. Yes I do that. Yes it is fun. Some of the artwork in old manuscripts is beyond amazing.


The Fault in Our Stars inspired necklace-- the iconic "OKAY".


Another piece difficult to name-- "Etched Leaf Pendant" which is this cool fern-like leaf design that I use in a lot of my drawings.



Another TFIOS necklace-- "Okay? Okay. Necklace"



Triquetra (or "Trinity Knot") necklace.

I am SO BEYOND EXCITED about this technique, even though it's crazy complicated. The possibilities are well nigh endless!!!!!!!

That being said, what do you think I should make? I am looking for ideas because when I try coming up with ideas on my own I get so many that I can never narrow in and decide and can thus wind up using none of my ideas!

Yesterday I was a vendor at the St. Theodore Tea and Fashion show and I needed a display to put my jewelry in! I spent exactly zero dollars on this, and just used things we had lying around the house! Somehow it still managed to look pretty professional and now I want to do more craft fairs just to use it! (I don't know if I'll be able to this summer, because it's such a time commitment--- we'll see!).

I know that most of you won't have supplies like these on hand, but I always like to see how others come up with solutions for things even when I don't have the supplies on hand. It usually helps me to think outside the box-- something I had to do a lot of for this display. No way was I going to spend $100 or more buying the "real" supplies that "real" artists use at fairs. I can buy beads and wire instead! :) The only item that I personally bought was the white necklace stand, and I got that months ago to use in photoshoots.


As I thought about putting a display together, I kept thinking about height-- no one likes bending over to see things!

The main part of the display is an unfinished oak kitchen cabinet which my Dad bought for $20 because it was damaged. We haven't given it a proper home yet, so it was out in the garage receiving a coat of cobwebs. It's heavy, but not too heavy to carry by myself.


The earring racks are two pieces of thin wood which I cut into rectangles with the scrollsaw and drilled dozens of holes into. The only downside is that a couple of the earrings get stuck in the holes-- they aren't too hard to get out, but they aren't too easy, either. It does make it easy to transport because none of them fall out on their own!

(By the way, I'm curious to know how other artisans price their jewelry for craft fairs. I rarely have more than one of any item on hand, except the ever-popular Evenstar collection, and it's tedious work to put a price tag by every item. Online, I can set each item to the exact price for my supplies and time. I would up compromising yesterday and averaging out the price of items to the nearest even-dollar increment. This meant that I had $7 and $14 earrings on the same rack, priced at $10. It's not ideal but for a one-day event I didn't know what to do!).



The strip lights are something that Dad had in the garage-- something for his truck, I've no idea what they are exactly but they are battery operated and stuck to the top with double-sided tape!


I was trying not to damage the nice cabinet so I used masking tape-- it was just strong enough but I was afraid it would fall down as people fingered the items! (it didn't!)


We had this wooden box lying around with knickknacks in it. I rolled up some fabric into little rolls and laid them side by side to display my rings properly. The cheaper plain wire rings and guitar string rings got jumbled up on the left because I had too many!


The necklace display is made from the cabinet doors. It wasn't ideal-- I think that necklace displays do a much better job of showing off my full necklaces. If I do any craft fairs in the future I will reserve these door displays for the pendant necklaces only. It works *great* for that!




Lookie! Lookie! More Evenstar colors! It turns out that it's very difficult to find the leaf beads that I use for the Evenstar sets, especially when the website I usually buy from stopped carrying half the colors. Other places have them for crazy expensive prices. Think 50 cents or a dollar a bead. Then I found Brightling Beads and Shipwreck Beads so now I have every color they have in stock. Lots of new Evenstars!

I also will start using silver-plated chain instead of aluminum for the Evenstars. The aluminum I had before was cheap but wasn't up to par.

Anyway, the Evenstar necklaces and Enchanted Forest earrings are on another thin sheet of wood. I drilled holes for the earrings and nailed nails in to hang the pendants up.

The sapphire blue set is on the necklace stand that I made with an old book and a cereal box-- check out the tutorial here.




It's the first new item that I've had a chance to put up on my Shoppe-- check it out!

Hope you liked this peek at the jewelry display I dreamed up!