AJE Component of the Month - July

Another month has flown by and it's COM reveal day!

Things are getting slightly more organised in the new studio and I'm enjoying getting back to making.

This month, we were treated to a beautiful dichroic glass cabochon from Francesca Watson.

Just look at all of those beauties! There's something about dichroic glass that really gets me so I jumped at the chance to play.

Francesca works in a range of mediums and her work is stunning... check it out here http://francescawatson.com

This is the cab I chose... I remembered to take a picture!!!!

So I got to work on sketching out some ideas. The cab is larger than anything I have worked with before, and everything I came up with as a pendant design seemed too big. So I decided to make a brooch. I cut some porcelain flowers and fired them unglazed, made some silver headpins and dug out my box of seed beads.

I glued the cab on to some stiff stuff and bezelled around it with size 11 & 15 seeds in green.

Once the beadwork was finished, I put the flowers on the headpins, folded the tops so that they were secure and formed a loop on the opposite end for securing them to the brooch. They were sewn in and a brooch fitting glued on. The back was finished with some ultra suede.

I've had great fun working with my cab and would like to say a big thank you to Francesca for her beautiful component!

If you'd like to see what the rest of the team and guests have made... follow the links :)

Guest Designers

Deb Fortin - www.studiok24.blogspot.ca

Toltec Jewels - www.JewelSchoolFriends.com

Carol Briody - cbriody.blogspot.com

The AJE Team

Caroline Dewison - blueberribeads.blogspot.co.uk

Susan Kennedy - www.suebeads.blogspot.com

Melissa Meman - melissameman.blogspot.com

Jenny Davies-Reazor - www.jdaviesreazor.com/blog

Kristen Stevens - kristen-beadjourney.blogspot.com

Francesca Watson - www.francescawatson.com

AJE Component of the Month - June

Here we are again, another month has flown by. I've not had much time for making recently as we're doing a lot of work around the house and garden, which means most of my supplies have been put in to storage.

This month, I managed to retrieve a few bits and bobs to create something with my beautiful Art Jewelry Elements COM from Linda Landig.

Linda has recently jumped in to the addictive world of ceramics and produced her first clay components. As well as her ceramics, Linda also creates beautiful jewellery and you can find her work here - LindaLandigJewelry

Here are some of the components we chose from...

I picked this beautiful rose pink and blue floral pendant to design with. (I'm not explaining myself for forgetting to photograph them before I start any more... you're probably used to it by now!)

I was limited to what I could get to to create my design, but I found seed beads, Czech glass and crimp wire and put them together to create a simple but pretty necklace.

The leaves and flowers fell together on my mat and I loved how they looked, so started with that as the base for the design.

The beaded berries are made from magatama drops and seed beads.

I would have preferred an antique bronze clasp on the necklace, and bronze wire for the pendant (which I will swap over when I get my supplies back) But for now it has a brushed steel toggle and silver wire.

I'd like to say a great big thank you to Linda for her beautiful component, I've had great fun designing with it, and I've also found that limiting yourself can be a good exercise!

If you'd like to see what the rest of the team received and what they created, click on the links...

Guests
Ann Schroeder
 Mischelle Andrade Fanucchi
Therese Frank

AJE Members

Susan Kennedy

Diana Ptaszynski

Linda Landig

Lesley Watt
MelissaMeman

Caroline Dewison

Francesca Watson

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Rebekah Payne

Kristen Stevens