Saturday, November 24, 2012

Fibular Pin Design Notes



Fibular Pin Designs

The term Fibular comes from the Latin term, fibulae, referring to brooches.  While the overall structure of a fibular pin is limitless to your imagination (just do an image search the term “Fibular Pin” in a search engine and see the thousands of different styles that come up!), every fibular pin has the same technical components: Hinge, Body, Spring and Pin.
 The body is the flat plate between the hinge and spring where, in beaded and wire worked pins, most of the decoration occurs.

The hinge, located at one end of the body section, will have some kind of cup, hook or other structure to tuck the pin end into to keep the pin secured shut.  This part can also be extremely fancy and beaded.  It is often hidden in a brooch design.



Tuesday, July 24, 2012

A Bit About Fitting Your Body

Not my typical technical jewellery post today (or year?) but I am also an avid knitter and wanted to collect these posts on how to find knitting patterns and modify them to best fit your body shape.  

Having these posts in 1 spot will help me pick better sweater patterns in the future!

Amy Herzog of http://www.amyherzogdesigns.com has put together these tutorials for us for free.  She sells each one for $2 for a single PDF and you can buy all 10 in pdf form for $10.

Fit to Flatter Installment 1: Introduction
Fit to Flatter Installment 2: Shapes (and how to flatter them)
Fit to Flatter Installment 3: Mindful Project Choice
Fit to Flatter Installment 4: Sweaters and You
Fit to Flatter Installment 5: Necklines
Fit to Flatter Installment 6: Sleeves
Fit to Flatter Installment 7: Sweater Length
Fit to Flatter Installment 8: Shaping
Fit to Flatter Installment 9: Implementation
Fit to Flatter Installment 10: Conclusions

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Coiled Coil Bead

I cannot talk about the coiled coil bead (my own term)  without first mentioning I first saw this technique on the jewellery of Connie Fox from www.jatayu.com.  After thoroughly devouring the education section of her website, I found a free tutorial from Connie Fox on how to make her bangle style with the beautiful feature bead made entirely of wire.

The photo left is the bracelet straight from Connie Fox's "Elegant Twisted Bangle Bracelet" featured on the tutorial link page at Jewelry Making Daily by Lapidary Journal Jewelry Artist.  The tutorial was originally split over two months so in two parts.

Part one features how to make the "coiled focal bead" opposite the fancy hook.  As it is on the Jewelry Making Daily website, it requires you to register first, which is free.  Part One Link here.