Back after ridiculous time away

Well, I haven't written anything on here for an insane amount of time, so here's a short hello.
I've been doing a lot of stuff fusing silver to copper, making pendants. Having spent a lot of time making intricate beaded jewellery this technique is a really great antidote.
Recently I experimented with making a bowl. For the jewellery I use pre-cut shapes as they are really very well priced and I couldn't make them myself for the same amount, but for the bowl I needed to cut the shape by hand, this was easier than I thought, takes a little care as the blades are very fine and break easily.
I used a pair of long silver earrings bought from a second hand market, very 80s. It's very small bowl as I only have a little doming block to make the bowl in.
Here it is, not completely finished in these pictures, needed a little more polishing.

Not too bad for a first attempt I thought.

Finished Moonlit Water pendant

I've been working on a little piece which I've called either Moon Water or Moonlit Water, although I think I might have used the second version for a much earlier piece.
The piece uses white sea glass and silvery and white beads, both vintage and modern. I frequently use silver wire torcs to hang these pendants but I decided that this time I would make a beaded necklace.
(For people who think I've misspelled torc, that's the right spelling, torque has something to do with engines, sorry bit of a pet hate of mine)

This is very unusual for me, I actually drew a design for this piece, it's even turned out not too far from this!

Here's a very early stage of the piece, fixing the sea glass to a backing with rows of hand stitched beads.

This is the pendant finished, slightly out of focus sadly.

I've recently started using metals, fusing them together. So I decided to make a fastener for this piece out of silver wire.

The clasp is a T Bar style with a loop which the T bar fits through. It's made by twisting wire round itself and then fusing it with a blow torch. This wire was quite fine so I had to be careful not to just melt it. After cleaning the fused wire is hammered flat, this makes it much harder, work hardened.
In the top image you can see the mini anvil I use to hammer the shapes with a small modellers hammer.

Here's the finished piece on my work mat. I've added some embellishments to the simple beaded necklace, partly because it felt like it needed something, and also so that the pendant will sit with it's clasp visible at the side rather than at the back as usual. After all if it's such a nice fastener why hide it?
There are a some tiny baroque pearls in this piece which I found on an antique/junk stall, it's a great multi strand necklace so lots of pearls available.

Some new stuff

I've always wanted to do something with recycled jewellery, I have a collection of bits of jewellery, a lot given to me by my mother, and some I've collected over the years. I started in a small way adding occasional bits to the beaded stuff as embellishments, but I actually took the plunge and made the pieces of an old brooch into pendants the other day.
These are made from a rather ugly brooch which was probably from the 1950s or thereabouts, I don't remember where it came from.

There were sparkly 'flowers' making up the brooch, three like this and two like the one below. I rather like the effect of the inadvertant flash in the right hand pic. I always turn flash off but my camera's default setting is auto, so my first shot usually uses flash, then I curse, delete it and turn the flash off! This time I kept it, it gives a good idea of the really flashy glass stones.

This is the other style of flower, the brooch was a bunch of flowers on thin metal stems emerging from a single crystal stone like the one in the centre of this flower. I have a drawing of the brooch, done from memory as I cut it up ages ago, but for some reason blogger won't let me load it.
I've just started to make a piece from the hands of an old clock, I bought three for 50p from my local collectors market, I don't think they come from the same clock although they are all made from blued steel, one is in better condition than the others and quite fancy. I've fixed two together, they turn, which is quite fun, I need to figure how to make a piece of jewellery so that they still can when worn.

I think I'll use a bead from this necklace, and maybe some other parts of it too somehow. Not sure how yet.

On a completely different subject I'm watching Agora while I write this, about the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. I work in a library which is struggling with too few staff, no lending dept manager and a ban on overtime. At a recent consultation meeting about budget cuts within the county council, a councillor was going around the groups of people voting for their ideas on what to cut, suggesting that closing the libraries would save lots of money. When he was asked what the schools would do without the library service he replied  'they have their own libraries.' It was pointed out that the county schools library service is where the schools get their library books from, he was amazed, as he didn't know that. It's very worrying that such ignorance of a service should be allowed to suggest closing it. I had a similar experience a few years ago, I ran an arts centre for young people, we offered classes in all the arts and had recently begun providing specialist assistance for young people with disabilities. The borough council responsible for it was required to make huge cuts and my centre was being offered as the sacrifice within the arts service. At a meeting with elected members I was asked to describe the services offered at the centre, when I had finished the councillors said, 'we had no idea you did so much there!' They still closed it though.
The fall of the Roman Empire began with the closing of a library.........