All that glistens may be gold

Colour is an important factor for jewellery no matter whether you prefer the luxurious glint of pure gold or the colder but chic silver.  The bright colours of gems and crystals of course, are also what make them special.

Did you know that the colour we see is the colour the object reflects?  To put it more simply, a red apple absorbs all the colours of the rainbow caught in the light of the sun.  The only colour it doesn’t absorb is red and this is the colour it reflects and the one we see with the human eye.

So what I can hear you all muttering!  Well some clever guys at Southampton University have found ways we can see gold or any other metal as different colours without any chemical applications.  Basically by scratching the surface of the gold in a particular way, the colour it reflects to us can change.

Of course this is could be important for jewellery but even more so for documents like bank notes making them harder to forge.

How clever!

Looking for time, space and inspiration

Gosh it’s a year since armcandii’s blog was updated.  What have we been doing?

Well first of all we had to compromise our studio space when we had the kitchen redone last autumn.  As the ‘studio’ usually shares its space with the dining room and our working office and then as a makeshift kitchen too, it was impossible to make any new pieces.

We did manage to introduce two new collections though – Doodle and Sewn – and show them off at a Christmas open house and then in Fisherton Mill Gallery at the end of last year.

It’s time to start making again.  During this year we’ve been busy on Pinterest collecting inspiration in many forms including other people’s amazing creations.

What will we do next?  Watch this space....

Salisbury Art Trail

The bi-annual event is well underway with only 3 days left to discover local talent and their creations. See artists’ work in galleries, studios and in their homes with some offering workshops for you to participate in. Enjoy installation art, textiles, jewellery, photography, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, painting, glass and sculpture.

This is the first year armcandii is exhibiting in the trail and we can be found in Fisherton Mill - the south of England's largest independent art gallery – alongside other invited and resident artists. We are debuting collections ‘sewn’ and ‘doodle’ with existing collection ‘couture’.


Sewn: textural hand sewn wire jewellery with suspended vintage elements

Doodle: sculptural hand 'doodled' wire jewellery with vintage elements

 

Couture: statement hand knitted wire jewellery with vintage elements

The Mill is this perfect place to start the trail and fuel up on coffee and cake whilst you plan your route. Or drop in for a well earned lunch halfway through and stay for afternoon tea. The food alone is worth the visit.

And if you don’t manage to get to the Mill during the trail, you can still find us there after the 16th October or purchase via our website.

Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Etsy and Flickr.

Circles and Treasuries

As designer/makers we not only have our own website but we also have a shop on Etsy.  For anyone who doesn’t know Etsy do check it out – it's a selling site where you can find anything hand made, many things vintage, supplies for many crafts as well as tips on running your business.

A recent app that has been added to Etsy is Circles.  This application allows you to add other Etsians to your ‘Circle’;  Etsy tell us:

‘Your circle is a great way to stay connected with other members of the Etsy community.  When you add someone to your circle, you can see their stories on your activity feed.  There are many ways to use Circles.  Some people you may want to add to your circle might be: friends, family, Etsy shops you like, or Etsians whose style you admire.’

Then there are Treasuries.  These are a hand-picked 'table' of favourite things or listings that fit into a particular category or colour which any Etsian can make.  In fact the opening page of Etsy always has a treasury listing and this is a way of your items being found quickly.

armcandii have featured in three treasuries recently:  Summer Fever featuring our Carnelian and Agate Cosmo bracelet, A Golden Season showing our Rose Quartz Cosmo bracelet and Lots To LUV about Sunday Mornings showcasing our Silver/Red SEWN necklace.

Thanks guys!



Happy Birthday www

Apparently the World Wide Web is 20 years old today! 

It seems strange to think there was a time when a wealth of information, contact opportunities from email to social networking, games, downloadable music, YouTube, Google and much more wasn’t available at a click.

I certainly remember a colleague in the mid-nineties slamming it and saying it was just a phase! Back before www, we relied on faxes and the telephone especially to contact our European client although we did have a modem which connected to their phone line directly for transferring files usually to check the translation. The documents had to be in a specific form – now my poor brain can’t remember what but I know it was a dial up system and was pretty laboured.

How things changed. Email became THE way of communicating; it was fast and meant you could tick things off your list! I got into the habit of always responding to emails immediately or as fast as I could so that the sender knew I had received it and would work on their request ASAP.

Whenever the email was down it seemed like a catastrophe. We had to resort to the telephone which was fine for messages but not so good if visuals were necessary.

Just think without the World Wide Web I wouldn’t be boring any of you with this now! I wouldn’t be able to post a link to Facebook or Tweet about it and I wouldn’t be able to direct you to our website which is currently being updated to show the start of two new collections!

Too distracted to blog

Such a lot has been happening over the last couple of weeks that the blog has taken a back seat!  Not good.

First we’ve had the fig tree dug up – a sad, sad day.  It had grown very big, was too close to the house and in the way of the new door proposed for the kitchen so it had to go.  Such a shame as it was loaded with fruit.

The same day we had the Eucalyptus tree lopped and the Olive tree trimmed.  All are growing so well in our little suntrap patch!

Next we started to turn out of the kitchen ready for the refit in September.  We still have quite some way to go; compressing all we want to keep into our already overcrowded dining room cum office cum studio will be no mean feat.

Now today the guys are here mending the sash window in my bedroom.  Thank goodness it’s warm as not only has there been NO window actually in place but the front door has been wide open too.  And they have to come back tomorrow to finish the job.  It has been quite a big one, with repairs to the frame, a new panel of glass and now rehanging and weighting – oh and of course these jobs aren’t cheap.

In between this we’ve been busy making jewellery and adding it to our ETSY shop first, a little tweeting, a newsletter and keeping our Facebook page alive.

 

 

Silver doodle necklace

Silver red S E W N necklace

And also building ETSY treasuries and being featured in one (Summer Fever).  These really are fun and I find building them very therapeutic.  I made a conscious decision with the two I’ve built this week to take a different stand than usual.  So in the first one ‘More than a doodle’ I purposely included no jewellery, but concentrated on drawings, prints and photographs.

In the second one built this morning, I thought about things I like and that make me smile and produced ‘Birds of a Feather’.  Birds and things to do with birds feature in this one.  I just had some fun with it.

Hope you like them both.  If you want to keep up with our mad and serious creative moments, please follow us here, on Facebook and on Twitter @armcandii.

Artistic friends and new concepts

You often see cafes or restaurants where the art work is for sale but a friend has been able to show off her design skills by designing a room for a hotel!

Laura Luck was invited to decorate a room in Artists Residence Hotel and Gallery in the centre of Brighton. Her room is called The Watchers and as you can see from the image here it is bright and colourful with a number of curious creatures watching over you as you sleep!

The hotel website describes the room: ‘Effortless paintings of Japanese inspired cherry blossom trees inhabited by quirky little creatures surround an elegant four poster bed. The room leads to a balcony with a gorgeous view of the sea and the West Pier.’

There are a total of eleven rooms all decorated by different artists.

Laura found out this week that hers ‘is the most booked out room in the hotel, with people coming back to stay in it every year for weeks on end’. Laura commented, “Pretty chuffed about that!”

armcandii met Laura Luck, an Australian artist living and working mostly in Brighton at a Guerilla Market a couple of years ago. She has exhibited work in New York, London, Rome, Sydney, Canada, Melbourne and Zagreb. Her work delves into the mythology of modern life and its affect on us.

Loving your work Laura!