It's been fairly quiet since my last post but I've managed to squeeze in a trip to London with my ex-colleague and still-friend, Rachael Colley, a trip which involved culture and a lot of work by Lin Cheung. We started off with a visit to the V&A to see the final choices for the…

Another bonanza of a week as I returned to work on Tuesday after a long weekend in Brighton to all my students handing in their first assessment, which I then spent the week marking and writing up. (Photographs in next…

AND back at the bench! Hooray!

I've begun to catch up with commissions and making stock work. Immediately, I'm working on a piece incorporating a small 9ct Edwardian brooch and some of the metal found on Dungeness…

As many readers know (if you can call my small but dedicated readers "many"!) we've been running a degree programme within Glasgow Kelvin College - née: North Glasgow College - for some four…

... as I am no longer young, it has to be said, "Daffodils"!

I've spent the last few weeks working on a charity piece which kind of got out of hand. What started off as a request for a "life-sized daffodil…

Some weeks before Christmas, I was asked if I would take part in a fund-raiser for Cancer Research UK and I wasn't really sure that I would be able to afford the time, so it was pleasant to find that a commission I had planned for immediately after the New Year - a pair of Verdura-inspired cuffs - was to be delayed by about 10 days and I set to work on my plan. The brief - for Cursley & Bond's gallery in Folkestone - was…

 Another two-week hiatus between posts and it is only because I've been too busy to be able to find a moment to write things down. So much has happened, from being asked if I were "eligible" for inclusion in a list of "eligible bachelors" - my non-bachelor…

I've been in the workshop for two whole days now, finishing up my "sautoir/parure" which imagines the jewellery which Chanel (probably with the help of Fulco Verdura) would have…

This last week has been a whirlwind of activity and has left me feeling drained but exhilirated. I may as well not beat about the bush and say that I have been nominated as "Scotland's Most Stylish Male" at the bi-annual Scottish Style Awards. This came as a genuine bolt-from-the-blue shock and intially, I thought that one of the students was having a joke with me about my generally dishevelled workshop appearance but it turned…

I am now winding the workshop down for the end of the year. I'll be shutting-up fully on Thursday for two weeks, back again in 2013 with new projects to tackle.

Although I've not been quiet in this holiday season, I have been dealing with people who have been startlingly organised and this has meant that for the last week and the week to come, I don't have any rush-jobs to complete, no last-minute dashes to the post-office. The last Commission for the season was sent out on…

Well, I've not been blogging so much of late because I've been working on a project which I have been forbidden from documenting until the client has received it!

It has been the Christmas Sale at work this week. All my students make their work and sell it in the college, a percentage comes to the department for buying equipment and the balance goes to the students themselves. We keep the prices low and go for volume and this usually pays off, especially as most of the customers are…

Time to allow myself the luxury of a weekend in Edinburgh with nothing to do but see some friends and go to the opening of Stephen Bottomley's first retrospective.

I always sleep very well in Edinburgh: I stay with friends and the room in which I sleep overlooks a graveyard! Much needed as the changing clocks, seasons and the travel to and from the US has made my sleeping patterns somewhat messy.

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SO busy! All my first, second and third years have started for two weeks now and the degree final year students started today... In between, I've been packing up the Diamond Jubilee exhibition and finishing my "Macbeth Brooch".

The hackle is raven feathers. It is traditional in Scotland (I read, but have never…

Over the last few months, I have been inspired to make specific pieces in response to several "call for entry" postings on Crafthaus. First up, we have Loren Angulo's "Behind the Brooch", an exhibition and book about the way in which makers embellish the back of their brooches and how it relates to the…

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been really busy with family matters as well as learning to use the new mill and the associated software, so I've not really had a chance to make any of my usual work. I've been forced to make quick projects and have also been using the products of the mill as it is always so much more encouraging and interesting to be teaching oneself something with a real goal at the end.

As a result of this, I've been working largely in more conventional…

It's funny how one thing going wrong can eclipse everything else which went right!

I've had that happen today. I picked up working on Future Legend again, having given it a break to get on with Fashion:Victim for a while. (Fashion:Victim is at an impasse as I am waiting for a jet carving to be made for it and for some stones to be sourced!) 

Future Legend has been nearly completed for some time now, so it should be a matter of…

Hmmm... I do like Crafthaus, so it was most alarming to me to be unable to access it for a whole day yesterday due to my ISP finding a routing issue relating to it and me having to wait until it cleared. Fortunately, it is cleared now. The good side of the whole event is that I finally persuaded our network manager at college to unblock it, so I have access there too, as do my students. 

Been really busy with the new students, so I've not had much time to do my own work:…