Jewelry Designers Should Be Avid Jewelry Collectors

The Carrotbox is a site dedicated to all those wonderful rings made of glass, lucite, resin, plastic, jade, wood, bakelite, metal, and even stone. Alice Matsumoto from Vancouver, BC, Canada has a ring shop and has kindly given us permission to inspire our jewelry lovers at Sheffield with her discoveries. But unlike past posts, I wanted to share some of the rings in her own personal collection. She ingeniously enables people to click on a color to see her sorted-by-color ring collection, and they've certainly helped to inspire her own jewelry designs. Here are a few colors in her amazing ring collection.

I'm green with envy over Alice's collection of green rings.
 

Alice has only taken 333 photos of rings in her collection - but she has countless more to take!
 

Some of Alice's own ring designs - diverse, unique, playful.

Sheffield School began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.

Request a free Sheffield School catalog describing our distance education courses.

Subscribe to the Sheffield Designer newsletter.

Jewelry Inspiration: Bead Queen

Klimt02 is a website that provides an international forum for contemporary jewelry in a creative space that offers knowledge, information, debates, and exchanges - all within the artistic realm of jewelry. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Kilmt02 inspires everyone interested in the selection, quality, art, technology, and creation of art jewelry. Sheffield School has kindly been given permission to share works of global designers here on our website. Today's post focuses on a jewelry designer we've singled out in our Sheffield School course in Jewelry Design: Beading & Wire Working - the incredibly accomplished Suzanne Golden.

Suzanne Golden

 
Suzanne Golden
Ring: Around the Daisy 2011
Tubular, Spiral Peyote Stitching

Suzanne Golden
Piece: Fish In Bloom 2011
Netting, acrylic beads, wood beads, seed beads

Suzanne Golden
Bracelets: Square 2011
Right Angle Weave, Embellishing, Acrylic Beads

Click to read more ...

Finding Closure In Jewelry Design

 

Before reading on... for those of you who think this blog is about relationships, I must clarify it is not. This is for those who are interested in creating their own closures when making jewelry. At Sheffield we teach students how to make their own clasps and ear wires, otherwise referred to in jewelry design as findings. Findings are the parts used to join jewelry components together to form a completed piece.

  

Clasps above both found on Something Sublime blog.

Clasp by Image Bead Jewelry on Etsy.

Embellishing clasps and ear wires with stones and coiling gives your work that unique handcrafted look. When you create your own clasps you can incorporate stones into the claps so there is a blending, a consistent feel with the work, instead of finishing your piece with a purchased clasp that may not be cohesive.

 

Hoops by Fail Jewelry.

 

Earrings by Fail Jewelry.

 

Learning to create your own ear wires is one of the most liberating moments in jewelry making. It opens the door to a whole new world of where you can take your designs. Rather than always having to attach an ear wire to a drop stone, or chain, you have the option to shape your earrings into one continuous piece. The hoop and inverted V earrings by Fail Jewelry are great examples of this. Learning how to make inverted V earrings, and hoops, are taught in unit four of the Sheffield Jewelry Design Course.  

Bracelet by Silver Bench Jewelry.

Once you know how to make your own findings, you may choose to blend your clasp right into the design of your piece, like the bracelet above by Silver Bench Jewelry.

If you're interested in learning more about jewelry design, we encourage you to explore the Sheffield School, New York, NY. Sheffield began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.

Request a free Sheffield School catalog describing our distance education courses.

Subscribe to the Sheffield Designer newsletter.

Jewelry Inspiration: Nature Calls

The Carrotbox is a site dedicated to all those wonderful rings made of glass, lucite, resin, plastic, jade, wood, bakelite, metal, and even stone. Alice Matsumoto from Vancouver, BC, Canada has a ring shop and has kindly given us permission to inspire our jewelry lovers at Sheffield with her discoveries. In this post, Alice focuses on rings inspired by nature.

These shapes aren't just inspired by nature — they're colored by nature, too, in the form of dyed paper. Rings by Greek jeweler Silina Pandelidou.

Bonus

UK jeweler Karen Fox is inspired by "architecture and urban landscapes" rather than nature but she, too, has a paper ring. This piece is from her "Pleat" series.

Even more jewelry:

• Julia Magr (Germany) - paper pebbles
• Natalie Gock (Australia) - modern metal
• Evelyn Pelati (Connecticut) - contemporary silver

Sheffield School began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.

Request a free Sheffield School catalog describing our distance education courses.

Subscribe to the Sheffield Designer newsletter.

Jewelry Inspiration: Wood You, Could You?

 

Klimt02 is a website that provides an international forum for contemporary jewelry in a creative space that offers knowledge, information, debates, and exchanges - all within the artistic realm of jewelry. Based in Barcelona, Spain, Kilmt02 inspires everyone interested in the selection, quality, art, technology, and creation of art jewelry. Sheffield School has kindly been given permission to share works of global designers here on our website. Today's post focuses on a jewelry designer from Greenville, SC, Kate Furman, whose jewelry designs use a prolific amount of wood + talent.

Kate Furman

Kate Furman
Necklace: Splinters 2012
Found wood, brass
32” x 16” x 1”

Kate Furman
Necklace: Splinters 2012
Found wood, brass
32” x 16” x 1”
Detail

Kate Furman
Necklace: Limbs 2012
Found wood, brass
12” x 2 1/2” x 1 1/2”

Kate Furman
Necklace: Hewn 2012
Found wood, brass, steel, sterling silver
15” x 3” x 1 1/2”

Kate Furman
Necklace: Hewn 2012
Found wood, brass, steel, sterling silver
15” x 3” x 1 1/2”
Detail

Kate Furman
Necklace: Reassembled 2012
Found wood, steel, suede, epoxy resin
4 1/2” x 3 “ x 1 1/2”

Statement

Nature is my greatest inspiration. While in the woods surrounded by the astonishing details of a tree trunk’s swollen scar or the intricate furrows of creatures burrowing beneath its bark, my senses are fully engaged. In my work, I translate this admiration and wonder into jewelry, a format as intimate to the body as the moments I pass in untouched, tranquil wilderness. After gathering detritus from the forest floor, I manipulate, alter, and respond to the beauty within branches, bark, and sticks. By tracing and replicating the curves of the human body, my pieces contour and move to it, thereby intertwining and activating each other.  I am interested in calling attention to the intersection between people and the environment through ways the two affect each other. As Sigmund Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents, humans repress the environment and their animal instinct in order to control nature and live a civilized life. My process responds to this need without taking full authority over the natural materials. Instead, I direct a harmonious dialogue between them, revealing the ways we affect and intersect each other. The resulting forms show a sense of my influence but retain an inherent rawness; a collaboration and language of mark-making develops between us. - Kate Furman   website: www.katefurman.com mail: furman.kate@gmail.com

If you're interested in learning more about jewelry design, we encourage you to explore the Sheffield School, New York, NY. Sheffield began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.

Request a free Sheffield School catalog describing our distance education courses.

Subscribe to the Sheffield Designer newsletter.