Category: My Business

Beer Jewellery? Yep.

14/11/2016

Barley earrings. Photo buy Suzannah Maree Photography.

Amanda and Steve of Invercargill Brewery are staunch supporters of the Arts in the South. They knew the struggle of being a small, startup business, and they know the joy of bringing something unique and genuine to an appreciative audience.
Invercargill Brewery sells their craft brews, some selected international imports, glassware and merchandise in the Cellar Door shop attached to the on-site brewery on Leet st in Invercargill. They approached me a couple of years ago about creating a line of brewery-themed jewellery to sell to their many international and out-of-town visitors. Thus began a long process with a huge learning curve for my arts practice.

Invercargill Brewery's "Meet the Brewer" event. They host frequent arts and cultural events at the Brewery, including local bands and visual artists.

I had already been thinking of making a line of jewellery that partially outsourced the manufacturing. When I hand make every part of a piece of jewellery, it inevitably takes a long time and needs to be priced accordingly. This was a good opportunity for me to explore having some elements of my work made by some other manufacturing process, and thus make my jewellery more accessible.

Some of the design process in my workbook

When I finally had the design finalised, the biggest problem, among many, was getting someone to laser cut stainless steel. I talked a bunch of different businesses (staying within New Zealand as I wanted to keep it as local as possible) but not many were prepared to make a small run for me. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the galvanised iron crystalline surface that I wanted as the laser cutting couldn't be accurate enough for my design. Eventually I found one that would do the cutting, had a small test run done, then ordered a big batch.

Earring front plate as received from the laser cutter on the left, and after about 10 minutes of work with my needle files and a tiny sawblade.

The earrings picture a head of barley, an ingredient of beer, on a shape a little like a barrel. The pendants show three apples on a branch. I especially like Nally's Cider, a crisp, low-carb cider made from heritage varieties of apple, grown near where I live in Arrowtown.

The teensy tiny nuts and bolts that hold the jewellery together. Matchstick for scale.

I imported some gorgeous miniature nuts and bolts from a model train supply outfit in England, and washers from Australia. They came with their own little wee spanner and socket wrench. using these tiny tools on the tiny nuts and bolts is my favourite part of making up the jewellery.

The back of a pendant and earring, showing how it's held together with the bolts and nuts. The washers turned out to be necessary to stop the nuts sinking into the wood.

I carefully selected and brought in the chain, earring hooks, catches and all the other findings. After a few trial runs and ironing out problems that came up (sounds simple but it took MONTHS) I finally had the jewellery ready to go.

The packaging was another new thing to me. After a whole lot of searching, I found a supplier who could stock me with cards and cellophane bags that fitted my product. Happily, I've been able to use them for my next product that involves an industrial process, this time, 3D printing. I also got some stickers made up especially for this packaging.

As a beautiful finale to the manufacturing stage of the project, my friend Suzannah Maree photographed the jewellery. She had been involved with the finishing and assembling of the jewellery so knew it intimately. Her photos of it are stunning. After being embedded in the problem-solving process for so long, it was wonderfully refreshing to see Suzy's take on my creation. She saw it with fresh eyes, and showed it back to me in these beautiful photographs. Suzannah is an accomplished photographer. I'm especially enjoying her new Instgram page featuring intimate wildlife and nature scenes.

I LOVE Suzy's lens flare in these photos.

The tree setting is perfect.

Oh... that dawn light. Exquisite.

And stones, because everybody likes stones.

More lens flare, because I can't get enough of that lens flare.

Links

Buy the jewellery here.
Check out Invercargill Brewery and their choice brews here.
Suzannah Maree's Website, Facebook Page and primary Instagram.

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Lifting Jewellery!

11/11/2016

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Love to lift?

I love to lift. The heavier, the better.

You'll know that feeling. Sweating, shaking, having almost been beaten by the iron, you walk away victorious. You fought your own weakness and excuses. You showed up and did the work. No matter the numbers on the plates that you lifted, you won.

You know you're stronger than yesterday.

I made this piece about that feeling.

Buy it here.

Because no matter your level of competition, you are always lifting against yourself. It's about what's going on on the inside.

The blacksmith shapes hot metal with hammers on an anvil. I use these tools in my jewellery work to shape my metal, and it is like what we do with our bodies and minds in the gym. Hard work, heat and a certain amount of pain are the tools we use to shape our bodies into the vehicles we want to live in.

This pendant is based on a barbell weight plate. 3D printed in stainless steel, it features the words "INNER STRENGTH" and a barbell on the front, and my insignia of an anvil and two jewellers' hammers on the back. The cord is durable rubber, and the adjustable length toggle and crimps are sterling silver.

As it's costly and time consuming to get these made, and I need to wait for the stainless steel to ship from the US, at this stage I have a very limited amount of Inner Strength necklaces on hand. The best way to get them is to pre-order from my Etsy shop. If you get your order in before the 20th of November I will be able to get it you in time for Christmas.

Making jewellery is my home-based business. Besides helping to support my family, it's how I fund the costs that come with competing at a high level in a minority sport that receives little or no government funding. By purchasing this necklace you are helping me chase my physical limits on the international stage.

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The Blacksmith and the Weightlifter - My New Logo

27/5/2015

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It's a year and a half since I moved to Arrowtown and I still had not updated my business cards. I liked my old ones and still have plenty, but almost all my contacts have changed from the old cards. About time I changed them up.

A brooch I made on commission for a friend. The photo I took of it made a nice background for my old biz cards.

I sort of already have a logo. Must be about 12 years ago now I had Regal Castings jewellery supply company make me a hallmark stamp. For this I needed something unique, but it needed to be simple, so that it could be milled out of hard tool steel in tiny profile. I made this little design below out of my initials. I made the original using the Microsoft Paint program.

My initials are A.C.T. I put them together in this little design to make a hallmark stamp. On the stamp, it's in reverse to come out the right way around on the jewellery.

The inside of the ring is curved so doesn't take the whole ACT stamp. I've also marked it with my 925 stamp, which stands for sterling silver - 925 parts silver, 75 parts copper.

I reckoned I could do better than that logo now. Not me personally of course, I'm a jeweller, not a graphic designer.

I engaged Finnbar Glover, one of my many creative cousins, who recently graduated from Otago Polytech's Communications Design degree to do the job. He spent a bit of time reworking the ACT logo. That stamp cost me over $400 to have made so I'm not changing it in a hurry. The plan was to incorporate it into a new design, but when Finn showed me the cool ideas he had for the anvil logo, the ACT logo just distracted from the effect so it got turfed off and removed to the back of the business cards.

I had searched up a bunch of images online of the sort of look I was after to show Finn and tried my best to describe it. Finn listened hard and came back with some ideas showing exactly the sort of look I wanted. This one went through a few little changes but is very much like one of the initial designs. What a good listener.

The big heavy looking shape is an anvil. I wanted an anvil because it's relevant both to my arts practice and to my weightlifting.

I love metalwork, and the thing I love the best is forging. I learnt how to forge steel and iron in the sculpture department at Art School, using a coke-fired forge, an anvil, hammers and tongs. I love the beauty of the process, the fire, the rhythm, and the feel of shaping hard metal blow by blow. It's hot, heavy, dirty work and I would be overjoyed to do it all day.

For various reasons I ended up being a jeweller rather than a blacksmith. I still forge silver, using hammers and an anvil, but everything's a bit smaller and not quite so exciting. In the photo below is one of my anvils. It's a bit beaten up, but it serves my purposes well. My good friend and jewellery artist Brendon Jaine gave it to me.

One of my jewellery-sized anvils and the two hammers used in the logo, the ball-pein hammer and the watchmaker's hammer.

As for my strength training, my garage gym is already called "The Forge". The hot, heavy, dirty work of getting strong is like both being the blacksmith and being the metal in a forge. I hammer my body, rep by rep and week by week in all seasons, slowly getting into the shape I need to be to do what I want to do. This analogy has not escaped other people. CrossFit.com's tagline is "Forging Elite Fitness". Mine isn't the only gym that references the art of the blacksmith in it's name either.

One of the hammers crossing the anvil in the logo is a ball-pein hammer. It's a robust, all purpose hammer with one flat and one rounded face. It's used to bash stuff into shape in many fields of craftsmanship. The finer hammer will be recognised by jewellers as a watchmaker's hammer. They come in different sizes. Mine is actually quite big for this sort of hammer. The watchmaker's hammer is for precision work, such as riveting and forging delicate wee pieces of precious metal.

The line in between the words is a barbell, the primary tool of an Olympic Lifter, a CrossFitter and a Powerlifter. The barbell is a tool I use to forge this body to make it as strong as possible.

Here's the finished cards! It actually didn't take much (well not from me, Finn put in plenty of work) to get the logo right, but it wasn't ready for printing yet. Figuring out exactly what information I wanted, deciding on a font, and then balancing out the possibilities and the costs of what sort of printing on what sort of paper took a whole lot more mental energy.

I actually wanted silver foil printed onto black card, but this was going to be very expensive to print, if possible at all. Because of the nature of the silver foil, apparently cards can only be printed on one side if this technique is used. The metallic grey card is very 'me' though, and I'm happy with it.

On the bottom right of the back the card you can see the old A C T logo in slightly sleeker form than I made it in Paint back in the way back when. As this is still hallmarked on my jewellery I'm holding onto it and want it on my cards. You might notice, annact.com has ACT in it, and so does my Instagram handle, act_ion.

How To Get as Awesome a Logo as Mine

Finnbar Glover, the designer can be found at www.finnbar-glover-design.com. He can make you an awesome logo too.

To see and even have a go at some real blacksmithing yourself head on down to Dunedin to the Gasworks Forge.

You can catch Brendon Jaine, buy his wonderful glass jewellery, and have a good yarn at the Queenstown Markets every Saturday in downtown Queenstown.

If you love tools like hammers, get onto the Regal Castings website and have a drool. Just don't use your precision-crafted jeweller's tools to try to make big sculptures. you'll wreck them. I learnt that the hard way.

Comments

Beer Jewellery? Yep.

Links

Lifting Jewellery!

The Blacksmith and the Weightlifter - My New Logo

How To Get as Awesome a Logo as Mine

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