Recycled and Unusual Jewellery

As part of the course, my class has been doing a unit called "Exploring Specialist Techniques" which involves us researching something we are currently interested in or something that we would be interested in finding out about (- exploring). Then we focus on a selection of "practitioners" from our chosen area within art and design - I am looking at the work of Colette Hazelwood, The Hairy Growler Jewellery Company, Pierre Degen, and Dianne Fox. It was incredibly difficult finding names of people who make jewellery that is slightly different to the normal, retail varieties. I did find a site on people using bottles for unusual things but the closest thing it had to jewellery was a stand/holder for jewellery but it had no actual pieces using bottles/bottletops. 

 

 







 As we are "exploring" these practitioners and their work, we also try out/experiment with some of our ideas that may involve or be inspired by the work of practitioners we look at.

Before I started this course, my family and I went to Orkney for a few days and saw leaflets advertising the "Craft Trail". Included in this trail was the workshop of Sheila Fleet, a very well-known jewellery designer, which we decided to go to.  On arrival we were given a tour of the workshop where we saw various people at work at the different stages of the jewellery making process.  We watched some jewellers using goose quills to apply enamel on to the silver work and then people polishing the final item of jewellery.

I really enjoyed this tour and it is part of the reason I started making my own jewellery.  This experience increased my interest in jewellery making.  At present I don’t work with sterling silver or other metals or the enamel I saw being used but it is something that I would like to progress to.  Up to now I have been using beads, eye pins, headpins, various chains, jump rings, lobster clasps, toggles, extender chains, as well as a few charms.  I have also tried to design a selection of rings, using both bought ring bases and eye pins.

For this unit I started out doing 'recycled jewellery' using milk bottle tops, crisp packets and, later on, corks. Part way through the project I thought it would make it even more interesting to make it 'unusual jewellery' and include things like paperclips instead of normal chain. I also tried using safety pins with a few beads on them.

'Unusual Jewellery' means it could be made from anything that isn't normally used for jewellery e.g. paperclips, crisp packets, bottle tops, corks, etc. which are all unusual objects for jewellery making.

 I started with plastic milk bottle tops, making flat circles to use as charms for necklaces, earrings and bracelets.  I have also used them as flat components for a bracelet and a necklace.  Making the flat discs was quite tricky to get cleanly cut discs/circles – first I used metal hole punches of varying sizes with a wooden mallet but these did not always give a clean cut. I ended up using the punches to make an outline of the circle and then used scissors to complete the task which produced an acceptable finished item.  I then moved on to using a Stanley knife for the larger circles to remove the bottle top rim which seemed to work quite well.  Compiling the different sized circles into items of jewellery was relatively straight forward without too many difficulties.

 

I then started experimenting with crisp packets using the idea from a section in CBBC programme “Totally Rubbish”, which gives measurements for the template for the components as well as instructions on how to fold and assemble these into bracelets, belts and even placemats. The first bracelet I made using this method, took a lot of patience (and chocolate!) to get the hang of linking several components together and even more for the final link as it was very fiddly to get the pieces to fit (and stay) together.

 

Up to this point I was using normal chain for the necklaces and bracelets, (chain was not required for the crisp packet items at this stage).  However, I was given the suggestion/challenge to find another material to use instead and I decided to use paperclips connected by jump-rings to create an unusual style of chain to complete the items of jewellery.

I then experimented making items of jewellery using only paperclips – using a mixture of coloured, black and white, gold and silver paperclips. While this had an interesting appearance, I thought it looked better with two beads as an extra feature within each item – I preferred this result to the original paperclip items without the beads. I also experimented using a crisp packet component in the place of the beads which I think had a similarly interesting effect.

 

I then started to think about possible ways to incorporate wine corks into my designs. I used a jewellery drill to make a hole through the centre of the cork so that I could use a headpin to attach it to the paperclip chain. Some of the corks had patterns/logos already printed on them so I used felt tip pens to fill in the blank areas with colours such as purple, brown and green (most of the patterns where images of grapes). I also tried varnishing some corks to see if it made any significant difference to the appearance of the corks – this created some interesting effects.

My final experiment was using candlewax. This happened quite by chance while I was helping clear some candles at Christmas and one of the candles had a complete ring around its base. I jokingly put it on my wrist as a bracelet and realised that it looked very unusual and that I could actually use it, and some of the other really interesting shapes from the candles, for my jewellery project. This was fun to do but as it was made of candlewax, some of the pieces were very fragile and easily broken and as a result were unable to be used as finished items. However, I would like to experiment further using this material to see how else it could be used within jewellery making.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also experimented with combining different sizes of bottle top discs which then gave me the idea to try a similar design using small crisp packet components.