There is a lot of sellotape in this post.



This week saw Birmingham host Spring Fair, the largest jewellery and giftware fair in the UK. Quite aside from being the largest collection of utter tat I have ever witnessed in one place, the jewellery and watch section of the fair is always interesting and over the years, I've made a few visits here. This time around, we decided to take our entire cohort…

Somehow it is approaching the end of January and looking at my last blog post, Christmas and New Year seem so far away. I've been incredibly busy working on lots of small projects - largely re-stocking after pre-Christmas sales both…

Lots going on in the workshop in the last few weeks but I'll start off with the completed pictures of Fashion:Vitcim by the incredible Andrew Neilson at…

Since my last post, spring can definitely be said to have arrived and the Easter break saw sunshine all day and every day except the last. It is great to be seeing the sky still slightly light at 9pm and to feel the warmth in the…

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…

A while back I received an unusual commission from fellow-jeweller, Poppy Porter, to make a piece using some titanium components from an F1 racing car. The pieces are beautifully-engineered and milled from solid blocks of metal.…

People familiar with my work may be surprised to learn that I use CAD (Rhino, primarily) as a design tool and that quite often, elements of my work are made using CAM processes, such as 3D milling of wax which is then cast in precious metals. My own approach to these technologies is not unique and while I don’t use them as a primary method of production, there are many makers who do – Janet Huddie,…

What a fiendishly busy few days! I've been working hard to make my work for the exhibition in Wales recently but between that, I've been getting quite a lot of odd commissions, largely for repeats of my older work - things like three-skull rings and wolf and bear rings. I've also been working with "humble doodler", Zook again (we worked previously on "Beneath the Skin". He asked me to make some 3d silver versions of his drawing: 

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I made a piece today from bits left over from Supercollider and a boar's tooth:

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Finally finished the Supercolliderpiece today. Not really in my usual style, but I'm fairly pleased with the way this worked out. Off to the photographer now!

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Nice day today; the students were either busy working on their Christmas sale or they were held up by the snow, so I spent a very relaxing day chatting to them and setting stones:

One of the students said that this looked "like something to control a spaceship"!

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Disaster...

Trying to cast the last - and largest - in the series of spheres made from old sewing-machine needles, I had to use a gigantic flask which I had never used before and which cooled down too much before the full vacuum could be drawn under it, so the metal chilled and the…

The Supercollider piece is progressing apace. I managed to cast the central torus element today:

I got really fed-up cleaning it! Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this, though it still presents the problem of how I am going to get all the investment plaster out of the inside of the hollow…

On Friday, I was sent to the most annoying meeting I've ever been forced to go to. It was given by a moron, an idiot who thought that it was enough to pompously declaim his unvalidated, ill-researched opinions on things relating to "sustainability", yet was hypocritical enough to brag about his "frequent visits to Greece" and his "two weeks in the Maldives", presumably all involving flights. Well, it is nice he can afford these things by selling his services as an advisor on…

Having now had a couple of weeks where a combination of loads of things on my plate and general late-autumn lethargy have conspired to prevent me from making any blog entries, I'm back to it after a week in which I saw an opera featuring a depressed singing egg and created a seriously dangerous structure.

Having seen the Call for Entries on Crafthaus for the "Hot…

I've been planning my entry for BJ Johnson's call for pieces based on inspirations from the works of The Cure. Since I first read about this exhibition, I've been planning what to make and have ended up going with my initial feelings that I should work with the initial idea I had after reading the proposal: to make a piece around "A Forest", their 1980 single and a song which, for me, encapsulates their…

Working on my new project, the customised tattoo machine and associated jewellery pieces, "Beneath the Skin". This project involves a collaboration between me, a tattoo artist in the US, an Argentinian maker of tattoo machines and a metallurgist in Sheffield! It is going to be exhibited as part of the "Galvanize Sheffield" exhibition. 

This week, I've been converting the drawings into 3D forms by various manual and digital means. The original drawings from…