Category: Jewellery

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Hand Made Jewellery Christmas Presents

Here they are.  The personalised Christmas presents we made with the owners in mind.  We hope they enjoy wearing them as much as we enjoyed making them.  They’re all either rhodium plated brass as a base for the pendants, with only a couple that are sterling silver.  The colours are all made by cold enamelling, or resin casting.

We love what we’ve achieved and each and every one in this post has gone to a Christmas home, as well as a few others that didn’t get in the photographs as they were still curing.

As a hobby, this is great, as the kids could be involved.  Yes, it did mean taking some important steps to ensure they were safe with mixing the chemicals, and I wouldn’t do this with very young children, but for my older boys, it has been a great way to give christmas presents that actually mean something to them, and a handmade gift for the recipients, both at school and at home.

I’m actually really proud of what we achieved in such a short space of time.  I love the drop heart pendant, so plan on ordering more of those blanks.  We only had one, which was lovely when it was done.

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Home Made Ashes Rings

So, last night was mostly about making our Christmas presents.  I was talking to a Twitter friend who had bought some resin and made wee pendants, and it spurred me on to finish a project that was badly needing sorted.  The fact that it’s also led to another addictive hobby and ashes rings, is neither here nor there.

Among that, I also made myself an ashes ring with a tiny portion of the ashes from my dog, who passed away a wee while ago.  I tried that as a means of giving my boys and their siblings a keepsake of their birth mum.

I have a small vial of her ashes, and they all wanted a piece of jewellery.  Looking online, it was clear that the prices were extortionate, and not necessarily appropriate for the kids as they are now.  I really didn’t like the versions of ashes jewellery I saw that had flakes of the ashes very visible.  It seemed a bit morbid to me.

Honestly, this ring does look better in real-life than it does in a picture.

Ashes Ring 3

Using a mix of resin, glitter and colour, I’ve come up with an alternative, using sterling silver as a base, and the colour added to the settings, whether they’re rings or pendants.

After a few disasters, I’ve finally got it sorted.  This ring contains a tiny portion of my dog’s ashes, but I now know what I’m doing.

Yes, some of you might think it’s a little morbid to make jewellery out of pet ashes, or human ashes, but I think a piece of jewellery is a much nicer memory than an urn of ashes for children.

The girls are all getting ashes rings, and the boys will have cufflinks as a keepsake.  Ok, they don’t look like glass, but they do look very pretty and the sparkles are gorgeous.  I may add an extra layer of shine to the one above and see how that looks with a little dome on the ring, but it’s actually quite shiny as it is in daylight.

One of the girls wants red and one wants pink for their rings.  I’m waiting for more blank rings and cufflink blanks to arrive so that I can make theirs, so I’ll post how they all turned out too.

I’ve been experimenting with pendants, so they will also be used as Christmas presents.  When they’re all dried and had their chains added, I’ll post some pictures of those.  All in all, it means we can make different people lots of different presents year on year.  I’ll just have to keep tabs on what kind of design we give to each person.

Jewellery making could become far too addictive…….