A Fairytale Princess Crown

Ever wanted to feel like a real princess with a golden crown? Well, I did – ever since I was a small girl. I drew lots and lots of princesses – just like my own daughter does it now – and all were of cause adorned with this tiny little crown, which seemed to balance effortlessly on top of their heads.

Well, today I am a goldsmith, in posessionof both the tools and means to create one, and so I decided to let this old childhood dream come to life. Here is the journey, which started with around 2,5 meters of silver wire:

I had made many – as in MANY - sketches in my sketchbook and finally decided on the one where the elegant curves of the art nouveau whiplash line I love so much had the best balance. Then I set out producing the first panel, taking notes as I went in order to make the creation of the following a bit easier.

So: One piece of roughly 27 cm 1,5 mm thick silver wire would form the base. I bent one end a bit and ran up a drop of silver, which I then smoothed soft again. Then I set out with my pliers, working to create the basic shape, which I then partly went over with a hammer on Grandpas anvil. Then the next 12 cm, which got the same treatment before they were soldered together. Then a test – does it still look right? Yup, it does!

A third piece of 1,2 mm wire was shaped and soldered on with the 3 bezel settings and here is what that looked like straight after:

Grimy and all, but the shape is as I wanted it!

So far, so good – now make another 4 identical panels!

And then the seriously difficult part: soldering it all together on a piece of half round wire. The difficult part is to make the solder flow, which requires a more or less even heating of the entire piece, without melting the thinner wires.

Success!

Now for setting the stones. That wasn’t entirely easy and I had to come up with some sort of support in order to be able to use the force required to push the bezels over the stones. A piece of wood came in handy…

All 15 stones set and the piece nicely polished, ready to be gilded

And here we go: One princess crown, covered in 18 carat gold and with 5 lively dancing pearls, individually mounted to each curl. What a stunner! I am very, very satisfied (and somewhat relived, to be honest ;-)

If you just GOT to have it, the good news is: You can! Buy it in the gallery in Copenhagen, internationally at Etsy or Amio in Denmark.

I brought the crown along with me to the Mama Gena book release in Copenhagen on 27th of october, where we crowned her "The Pleasure Queen" with it. I was rather proud to see my creation on the head of this fabulous pleasure powerhouse!

PS: Want to see another take at a princess crown? My very talented colleague Tess created one for her recent wedding – and what a stunner that is too!

Early stages

The finshed piece

What it looked like on the big day 

Support the Breasts– with a BOOB-Bracelet

October is the official international breast cancer awareness month, supported by numerous organizations. This is a cause that I most happily support bydonating 5% of the profit from the sales of my BOOB-bracelets this month. Additionally, I have donated a bracelet to the Danish association “Forældre og Fødsel” (Parents and Birth) which supportsbrand new parents in being so – especially focusing on the challenges of breast feeding.



So, why this focus on breasts? Well, apart from the fact that they generally are lovely and present an aesthetic detail that I happen to like a lot about my own physical appearance, this is a rather important cause in my opinion. One of my friends survived breast cancer which takes one hell of a woman (and a lot of luck)! And I have my own, painful experiences with breast feeding

I have the most wonderful daughter of 7 years, who was rather difficult to breastfeed when she was a baby. But I knew, that my milk was the best I could give her, and so I stubbornly fought on for half a year, when I – after no less than 4 rounds of mastitis – had to give up. That had the sad result, that the first half year of my daughter’s life meant a lot of pain to me, which complicated developing a loving relationship to her and probably contributed to the postnatal depression that I developed. That took some time to shake off again, but luckily she and I have catched up on the love a long time ago. However, it left med extremely aware of the challenges freshly baked mothers and their babies face in that first period, where breastfeeding is so overwhelmingly vital.



One of the challenges of nursing, as most mothers will know, is the fact that the breasts need to be emptied equally and evenly on both sides in order to avoid said mastitis. Alas, when having a nursing brain, the world turns sort of incoherent and your tunnel vision is solely focused on the tiny life in your arms. In that situation, remembering which boob is next presents a surprising challenge.

This is why I developed the BOOB-bracelet. It consists of a set of cockily domed boobs made of silver with either copper or gold nipples. The boobs are placed on – very appropriately – an elastic bra strap, which enables the nursing mother to easily move the bracelet from one arm to the other – thereby serving as a reminder when her own brain fails. The challenge is of cause to remember to actually do it… It is a somewhat cheeky piece of jewelry, which also appeals to strong women, who would like to support the cause – or just proudly display their gender (if in doubt).

The BOOB-bracelet costs 700 kr for a set with copper nipples and 850 kr for a set with golden nipples. The bra strap is by the way not closed – this is a detail each woman has to do for herself with needle and thread, ensuring that it fits just her. Buy the bracelet in the gallery or at Etsy.

The dragonling has landed

Lately I have been working quite abit with wax. Leaves, flowers and - especially - a little dragon that I have been dreaming about for over a year! However, wax is still a bit new to me, and hence I have been fumbling a bit around. But now it happened - the dragonling suddenly emerged just as I had pictured him!

After being cast, it looked like this:

Polished version:

And then I mounted it on a ring, encircling a lovely amethyst:

I have had a mold made of the dragonling and hence can produce quite a few of them. In other words, we're looking at the very beginning of the "Dragonling collection"! Right now I'm wearing this beata version, trying to figure out how to improve it. At least bend down the tail and maybe the claws a bit. Then perhaps a somewhat wider, but uneven ring shank?

I actually made a video of my qualms!

So, dear reader... what do you think? What would be the ultimate dragonling - ring (that's funny to say out loud! :-)  )

Wire works

My work is almost always associated with a curl or two – or many. It seems as if I just HAVE to create jewelry centered around or adorned with this particular shape. Do I have a curly mind? Perhaps that is the reason… Anyways, these days I’m again working with my curly hoops.

They have turned out to be quite a seller, and I see why: Especially the simple version appeals to many different kind of women – both the very young as well as the mature ones. A few days ago I sold a pair to a woman around 60 (at least) who had decided to get holes in her ears, and so happily bough a pair of the small, simple curls – without having the holes yet!

Inspired by the interest for my curly hoops, I have thrown myself into experimenting with the design again. I created a large batch of the small simple curls of cause – as I said, they tend to sell quickly – and then headed for new explorations within the more complex ones.

I work with 1 mm wire, mostly silver, but at times also gold. Yesterday I created a pair of the simple curls with some scrap red gold I had. That of cause required melting, milling and drawing down the metal first, which takes some time. But I love the irrational feeling of growing wealth as I see small blob of gold, which looks like nothing, elongate more and more. Of cause the amount of metal stays the same, but it FEELS as if I get more of it! The result is well worth the work, even though I had to create special little red gold bails for the pendants. What a fiddly task that is!

So why is wire a medium that I return to over and over again? Well, it’s like drawing. I draw in the air with wire and pliers. As I work, my mind finds peace and I literally go into some kind of meditative state, where the shapes, lines, curves and curls easily manifest themselves in my mind and transfer into reality through my hands. Afterwards I am always a bit stunned and awed by my creations and deeply cherish the ability to turn my dreams into solid matter.

Ohhh… pictures moving!

YouTube is the source of so much inspiration for jewelry aficionados like myself. There are both videos on how to create the pieces and of cause of the end result. Most of us can’t afford elaborate commercials like this amazing Indian one (LOTS of gold here!)

And hence we do slide shows, which are a lot more accessible. I like this one from Catherienette Rings (a fellow Etsyan)who creates steampunk jewelry. The soundtrack is awesome for this kind of jewelry!

Another Etsyan –Spinning Castle – used some kind of very nice template for her video - very nifty:

Now I wanted to do one too and a here is the result. It’s featuring jewelry created from silver or gold wire, in other words the airy selection of my fairytale designs – now with music :-) Geaorge Winston is playing his Japanese Music Box.

I tried to incorporate the look and feel from the video with the green grungy backgrounds. Hence the new look of this blog, my homepage and the YouTube channel featuring this slide show. I’m looking forward to creating more, cuz it sure was fun!

Stone slut in heaven

It’s been months since my last entry here simply because I have been way too busy! Starting a new business, complete with a shop and all is time consuming enough, but my part time job on the side was becoming an increasing drainer. Without going into too much detail, I can safely say, that the psychological working environment was hell. I’m this cliché artist-type of person, it seems, with a fleeting artistic mind and a fragile mental constitution. Or at least that’s what it felt like, as I slowly fell apart and last week I simply had to “throw in the towel” aka give up and have my doctor turning me in sick due to stress.

A week has passed from that moment, and it was the right thing to do, I can feel. I have been nesting at home, just doing non-challenging household work, reading, sowing, watching a movie and generally limiting my world and numbers of decisions to make to a minimum. It has done me good and although I’m still short-fused, cry easily and am generally somewhat fragile, the mood at least has become a lot better.

Today it got a LOT better, when I attended a private gem selling event at one of my commissioners. He knew a guy who once a year travels to India and comes home with literally tons of stones! He had brought a few kilos to this event and here we are:

Oh…. Being a genuine stone slut, this is exhilarating like nothing else! For the next hours I browsed through all the baskets fishing for those stones that were the very best ones. Though the gems were very fairly priced, of cause I went wild and ended up using a LOT more money than I had anticipated!

But at home, I could spread out the stash and felt like a happy dragon over her treasure, grumbling “Mine! All mine!” at my somewhat puzzled boyfriend, who really wasn’t that interested and rather would play WoW. Heh – my gems are REAL, although they do not grant extra dexterity when wearing them.

Here are the smaller, more delicate gemstones only.

As you can see, I especially bought a lot of topazes of a varying quality.

I love this cool blue and so do my customers. In other words: Nice new pieces with blue (and other wonderful) gems will soon surface!

Oh to be a stone slut with a fresh stash… yummy!

Delicate gold pendant

Gold is just delicious, isn’t it? The warmth of the metal, especially in contrast to something cooler, such as silver or diamonds is just so sumptuous. Lately, I have had the opportunity to work a bit more with gold, as a number of my customers have brought me gold to be reforged.


This time it was a very simple and, to be honest, rather ugly pendant in a lovely, slender snake chain. It was rectangular with 5 little bowls in it, each holding one diamond. The pendant was made of 14k gold and had diamonds – that was the good part. The shape was uninspired, to be friendly. This is when I should show you a before picture and doh… I didn’t make one. Then at least I should show you process pictures and again… I didn’t make them.

So, to be quick about this, before showing you the end result, this is what I did: I pulled out the diamonds and cast the gold into a stick. I rolled and drew it down to 1,5 mm wire and then I created “the usual” Karin-curly-pendant, this time with balls holding 3 of the diamonds and a facet cut drop of clear quartz.

The result I absolutely loved!