Snowflakes! Snowflakes in August!

Snowflake master patterns

The saga of the snowflake continues. I designed these lying in the garden last July with the intention of having them ready for Christmas 2009. That never came to pass …

So I finally got my act together and protoyped them back in January. I  got my master pattern and first mini batch of castings back from my caster just before I headed up to Scotland. I cleaned them up yesterday and they look lovely! I’m going to write a proper post about how they were made soon (to go with a talk I’ll be doing for the Shropshire Guild’s ‘Gorgeous‘ fair in October) but for now here’s a sneaky peak:

Sanded Snowflake

Busy Bank Holiday Monday

No sitting around complaining about the bank holiday weather for me, oh no.

Instead I was to be found sanding Tenby Street castings in preparation for Treasure in a couple of weeks. It’s a retail show that’s part of the giant, monster celebration that is London Jewellery Week 2009. It’s exciting to be involved, but since I only found out about the show last week it’s going to be something of a mad scramble to get everything done in time.

Today’s job was to get my rough castings clean and ready to have the findings soldered on tomorrow. It took a little longer than I’d hoped it would but my perfectionist streak comes out when I’m cleaning things and I start to image stratches and dinks where, to a sane person, it’s clear that there aren’t any.

At the end of Treaure-prep, day one, my bench looks like this:

Lots of lovely little castings, lined up during cleaning