Famous Jewelry Collections: THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

Thursday, September 13, 2012

THE BEADING GEM'S JOURNAL

Book Review - 30 Minute Necklaces and Free Tutorials

Posted: 13 Sep 2012 04:57 AM PDT

The 30 Minute jewelry book series is all about proving the point that it is possible to create innovative and good looking designs in record time. The projects are meant to inspire not just the time challenged but are also about expanding one's views of alternative jewelry making materials.

The 30-Minute Necklaces is probably the most challenging of all the 4 books - the others were for earrings, rings and bracelets. That's because necklaces are the largest pieces and could potentially take far longer. However, the featured designers did not fail to impress with their ideas. Note that each project have just a final pictures with step by step written instructions.

Some of my favorite projects included those which used unusual materials. 2 Roses Studio's table tennis ball necklace below combines sawn in half discs with brass ones and pearls!

Others used hot techniques in clever ways. People who use torches to ball ends of wires will love Vicki Cook's double balled wire and chain necklace.

I first thought that Joanna Gollberg's sterling silver necklace below involved curved and hollow metal tubes. But what she did was use very thick wire sections and soldered jump rings to them! Neato!

One artisan who took advantage of modern technologies was Sunyoung Cheong who scanned butterfly images and printed them on red metallic and transparency sheets for this cool design.

This one is tough to see let alone photograph but I thought the use of earring posts to secure loops of illusion film or polypropylyene strips utterly ingenious. According to the designer, Dilyana Evtimova, "Illusion film is a multi-lensed polycarbonate. Thousands of minute parabolic lenses are molded into the surface on both sides of the film." This results in unique optical effects.

There are a couple of free PDF downloads to try and will certainly show the look of the book. I am not sure I could saw 3 clouds as fast as Mimi Cheung can with her cloud inspired charms tutorial!

Joanna Gollberg's wire based necklace tutorial will require several techniques - wirework, soldering, balling, sanding and patination.

This delightful book is just chockful of highly creative projects which will energize anyone with a design block! It also encourages the learning of new skill sets and opens up minds to not just to new materials but new ways to put together necklaces!

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