The New Encyclopedia of Jewellery Making Techniques
Now emerging from my tax return fug to see that Jinks McGrath's 'New Encyclopedia of Jewellery Making Techniques' features my jewellery numerous times! This is really great, and feels like a fantastic honour because I remember reading the original version of this book avidly when I was studying.
My 18 carat gold doodle panel necklace is the sole piece shown on the 'Introduction' page, and heads the chapter on 'Working With Wire', as well as a snippet of it creeping into the contents page. Unless they've already sold it, this piece is currently in the Lesley Craze gallery.
The 'Design' chapter features pages from my sketch book, showing some of the drawings I made when working on my bird brooch series, and there are also some of my scribbly earrings and a pendant alongside.
One of my bird brooches, the 'Que?' brooch, is then shown in the section on wood in 'Using Other Materials'.
It really is a lovely book, and a quick flick through makes me feel quite wistful about for all the techniques I tried at uni but haven't used since. I really would like to find time to be a bit more experimental again: jewellery making is an amazingly wide subject area!
Anyway, in case you're interested, the book also features images of jewellery made by: Felicity Peters, Susan May, Anastasia Young, Catherine Hills, Lesley Strickland, Shelby Fitzpatrick, Mette Jensen, Alison Macleod, Daniela Dobesova and many others, so my jewellery's in very good company.
I was going to list the techniques covered, but honestly there are too many to mention. It's a classic book, and I really feel so honoured to be in it!
