The mixed blessing of a good tidy up

As I've blogged before, I have a hopeless case of terminal hoarditis. A consequence of which, is that your living space diminishes in size as you fill it with gubbins. It often has its plus sides of course - but there does reach a point where you can't bear your own squalor and something has to give.

Starting with our pre-Christmas tidy, we got the bug to address some problem areas within the house that were very long overdue - we realised that we have things stored that are never going to be needed and we could simply put the space they occupy to better use - like clothes my son grew out of several years ago. My husband used to manage a hi fi store and this resulted in him being pretty committed to keeping the boxes etc. for electric goods and the like, in case they needed to be returned - or you later sold it - 'as bought' or boxed condition certainly commands a higher price.

A worthy practice for anyone to adopt, but when you realise that you have the boxes, leads and instructions to goods that themselves are no longer in use, you need to draw the line. So we've had a blitz on clearing out cupboards and ridding ourselves of some of this clutter and making more storage space available.

The desk I use for packing was one area to get my attention whilst I still felt inclined. The space available to me for working was getting progressively smaller and when looking at it, it was clear many things being stored on there would be better elsewhere, so I set about sorting through the massive piles of papers I had in trays - you know the things you keep - too good, or potentially important, to throw away, but not sure where to file them. A task I have avoided for an indecently lengthy time.

I still have two boxes awaiting my attention - most of which will see shredder action - but I did find some treasures. I also found things that I'd put aside to deal with another day and it was a rather bittersweet process. Difficult letters both received and sent, newspaper cuttings of friends obituaries and photographs of people no longer in your life, for a variety of reasons.

But there were pluses too - photographs of family and days out you'd not thought about for a while and made you smile to remember, a wedge of Airmail stickers that I felt sure I had but couldn't find and a favourite set square I'd wanted several times and couldn't locate.

One of the treasures that made me smile the widest was some photographs of a boxer puppy - thinking back, I think this must be Hadleigh - who turned into a massive dog with a head the size of a breeze block - rather larger than their current female boxer Chelsea. I think the photographs must be well over 20 years old - but I'd certainly forgotten how cute he was, with his oversize paws and rather too much skin.

I remember the day this one was taken, the week my parents brought him home from the breeders - I was married by then and we went over to visit the first weekend he was home - and we all grovelled on the floor to play with him - and when he was totally tuckered out, he flopped onto a cushion and flaked out completely to recharge his batteries.

Who knew that I actually had a nice polished wood desk, buried beneath the detritus of too many years. I shan't leave it as long next time - even though there were some nice surprises and happy memories.

Where are my sultanas Boo?

I have two gardens - no actually, I have three really - on account of the garden wrapping round the house on three sides and each one being somewhat different and separate.

That sounds rather grand, but in reality, they're each very small (each has an area approximately the same footprint as the house itself) and even their combined area wouldn't qualify as a 'small garden' by landscape gardening and TV garden show standards.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

We currently have a pair of nuthatches - their MO is to grab food and take it off to hide in a crack or crevice in bark or old branches - I assume they go back to it some time later - the pair work as a team, hiding their food in locations adjacent to each other. Nuthatches are the only birds that descend tree trunks - and can feed - head first, as shown.

On the kitchen side of the house is what we call the 'railway garden' on account of it being adjacent to a local railway line running a tourist steam railway. A rather grand name for a rather scrubby patch of land that we can't do very much with. When we bought the house, in the late 80s, there were a few bushes and scrub outside the perimeter of this garden at the very end triangular tip of an area of woodland behind the row of houses and we got a lot of morning sunshine.

We have daily visits from all the common garden tits - this one being a blue tit.

As the years passed, the scrub became trees and the light levels diminished and things consequently didn't grow quite so well. The garden area was badly damaged in a freak flood that deposited tons of rubble on the lawn a few years ago and the buildings insurance covered it being re-landscaped.

We always have a posse of goldfinches in the garden, squabbling noisily in their little face masks.

We decided that it's position under trees that we couldn't trim (and didn't necessarily want to) was best served by doing away with the lawned area and to landscape it as a bird garden. We'd always kept feeders in that area due to the surrounding trees, so covering the original lawn area with coarse gravel, with large stone slabs to take feeders and tables, surrounded by some potted planting and seats, suited us well.

One of our handsome male bullfinches - we are currently blessed with 2 pairs. Each pair is monogamous and they are never more than a few feet from each other - if you see one, their partner will be within the same field of view.

We rarely occupied that garden, as the adjacent woodland made it a bug fest on summer evenings and it is actually open around the house, so not very private, so keeping it as one for viewing from the three large windows on that side of the house, rather than being out in, was the best use of the space.

We did return home one day and find that our garden visitors had somewhat increased in size. Another time we returned to find a cockerel, but I didn't manage a photo of him.

I keep the hanging bird feeders filled (largely with sunflower hearts, all birds seem to like them) and take out loose food for the tables, as required, along with warm water in winter. I make up my own mix of sunflower hearts, sultanas, chopped peanuts and supplemented with occasional stale biscuits, crushed fat balls and grated cheese. I obviously have a reputation for putting out good stuff as some of the cheekier visitors will remind me at the window if there isn't much left - or what remains doesn't contain their favourite morsels.

Some of the visitors are quite small - there's often a mouse to be seen scurrying from under the wall to pinch food off the ground table. I don't mind the mice, but I'm not keen on their larger cousins.

I have a very good selection of feathered visitors, from regular and widespread garden birds like robins, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, blackbirds, gold finches, dunnocks and sparrows to slightly more rural visitors like nuthatches, bullfinches, collared doves, wood pigeons, wrens, long tailed tits, jackdaws, crows and woodpeckers. I occasionally see a tree creeper and tawny owl too.

The tawny owl is certainly the most elusive and difficult to photograph visitor and this is the best I've so far managed, despite setting up a laptop and remote capture system when he was active in the garden one autumn and spending a lot of time waiting for him to visit. I gradually increased the lights and left them on for him to get used to them. Most often, we only get a fleeting glimpse as he lands to catch something to eat and triggers the security light.

The long tailed tits tend to arrive as a noisy, chattering gang to feed in a group - they have such cheeky and cheerful little faces, that they always brighten your day.

Sometimes there's a deadly quiet descends on the garden and I know that a sparrowhawk is nearby. In fact, just as I'm typing that, some instinct made me go to my office window and there was a tree creeper not ten feet from me. That's a particular thrill I never tire of.

I've only once got a proper look at the sparrowhawk - on this occasion he took his captured lunch just into the scrub outside the garden perimeter and I was only able to find him by following where all the other birds were looking and avoiding.

I think if I had to choose only one, the wren would certainly be up there as a my favourite garden bird. I just wish they didn't move quite so fast, I might have a better collection of proper photos and not quite so many of disappearing tails, if they were a tad slower.

At present I have at least three thrushes - in that I've seen three at once on several occasions - and they, like the blackbirds, are especially partial to some fruit. I put out a plentiful supply of sultanas in cold weather and they're always the first thing to go - crows and magpies will also come down to the furthest table at the fence-line if they spot sultanas on there - but they're more timid about venturing onto the tables closer to the house.

I was very excited indeed when I first spotted a tree creeper in the garden. Having spent a lot of time trying to get a photograph in the wild, I finally got one of my best photographs from my own utility room window - on a filthy wet and stormy day - which was very dark indeed! This small rowan tree has since died, but I leave it there as it is one of his favourite spots to feed and I often spot one circling up the trunk and dead branches.

Between the 6 or 7 blackbirds I have, with the three thrushes and a selection of other occasional visitors, the sultanas are picked from the mix in a matter of minutes and then those that feel they have missed out will tell me so.
The thrush above is one such feathered friend. She stands on the front-most corner of the table near the kitchen window until she catches my eye and gestures with her head that there is a lack of dried fruit. If I take some out, she'll return to feed and bob her head in acknowledgment from the same spot. I took the photograph above yesterday morning when we had a few moments of weak, wintry sunshine and she arrived for her elevenses. It amazes me how quickly thrushes and blackbirds can stuff their beaks with whole fruits and swallow them in the blink of an eye. Makes me wonder how they can become so partial to them when they don't appear to even taste them.

So despite the diminutive scale of my bird garden, in which little grows, the very trees that make it dark also bring me these lovely visitors, so how could I possibly mind.

My scrap pot bracelet and Christmas gift makes

My name is Boo and I'm a hoarder. I just can't help myself - if I think something might be useful, I just keep it. I can't bear to part with anything that might just come in useful some day, be used to fix something or just the part I need when making something. The fact that my house is stuffed to the rafters with junk is testimony to my [bad/good/environmentally sound; take your pick] habit.

Inevitably, the true usefulness of a saved item often peaks the very week after you finally part with it, so I tend to hedge my bets and keep things anyway. Just in case. I also feel slightly smug about re-purposing what most would probably consider to be rubbish and Christmas is one of those times when the rubbish generated is often of even higher calibre than the rest of the year - it's amazing, once you tune into it, just how many foodstuffs and gift items are packed with nicely coloured or coated card liners, for example.

I spent a few happy hours in front of a film over the Christmas period, making gift tags and bags ready for next year - the idea being that I don't want to end up in a last minute panic like I did this year - wrapping gifts into the early hours, as I'd left it too late. I made in excess of 50 gift tags just from one box of Christmas crackers, more from chocolate boxes and lovely received wrapping paper spray mounted onto white card.

All the smaller pieces of gift wrap I had from wrapping my own gifts were made into small gusseted gift bags - a habit I've got into in recent years as a quick and much easier way to wrap small and awkward items - a little tissue to wrap the item itself, then the bag is tied up through a punched hole with copious quantities of curling ribbon. making an attractive and easy wrapping method and you can make a bag with as little as an A4 sized piece of wrapping paper.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

The rag tag assortment of failed links from my scrap pot that went on to become a new bracelet for me.

I'm loathed to part with anything that might have a future purpose and it's no different with the materials I work with. Failed parts, clumsy solders or those that break when working, are put aside for potential repair, re-use, or simply melting into other components. I grade my Sterling silver scrap into two pots, one that's truly scrap, every smidgeon of trimming is saved for melting into nuggets etc. and larger pieces that might be useful are kept separate.

Thus over time, I'd accumulated numerous silver 'rings' that had the potential to be re-worked or rescued in some manner and the idea formed some time ago, to make these good, in between other work, to make myself a Sterling silver bracelet. So I started working on sorting some of them out and soon had a dish of assorted links for a bracelet. I made some new smaller links from those that couldn't be made decent and supplemented these with some new jump rings (some indeed cut individually from scrap itself) and a hook to bring it all together. I wanted to finish it to wear at Christmas and didn't really have the time to do it properly, so rather rushed the finishing.

The finished, albeit rather rough and ready scrap pot bracelet ready to wear for Christmas.

I have filed off the worse of the blimps and hammered to cover a multitude of sins, but the work certainly couldn't withstand close scrutiny or be good enough to give someone else, but I rather like it for myself - it feels rather virtuous that I have something nice to wear from my rubbish and whilst I could do with giving it some more time, I suspect that I won't and it has already been worn most days since I made it.


I don't normally do haphazard or random, it doesn't come naturally to me. But this 'scrap pot' bracelet was made up from a completely random assortment of parts - I just hastily arranged them on my bench in a way that looked pleasing to me and actually gave the end design very little thought. I suspect that this is part of its charm - I certainly think that, on this occasion, the end result benefited from very little thought and serendipitously just worked. Although I don't think I'd recommend this approach in client work - I was lucky this time.

The original source photograph for the leaf pendant - the larger leaf was manipulated into a black and white line drawing as an etching resist.

One of the reasons that I didn't have much time to work on the bracelet just before Christmas was that I was concentrating on making gifts for others. Further to recent posts on copper etching, I still had some ideas I wanted to work for loved ones as gifts. One of which was a leaf pendant for my mother which started life as a photograph of a backlit beech leaf taken one autumn, as above. I created a two tone resist design, transferred this to the carefully prepared copper sheet, sealed all the edges and back surface, etched it, cleaned the etched copper and sawed around the leaf shape and polished and rounded the edges, giving it a little leaf like shaping too.


I wanted to keep the plain border of copper sheet beyond the etching to a minimum and parallel to the leaft outline, but didn't want to drill a hole through the etching either, for various reasons, so this would require fixing something invisibly on the back to hang it from. I didn't really want to use a tube bail, as I have in the past, as I wanted to put it on a chain with quite a large clasp and a tube bail works best on fine chains with in-line clasps like snake chains.

So a soldered D shaped hoop on the back was the obvious solution, I could make it easily in whatever size I wanted to accommodate the clasp. My usual practice when soldering, especially in silver, is to use my own cut strip solder pallions, but I'd recently bought some solder paste to try and have found this especially good with copper, but less so with Sterling. The texture and workability of the paste allowed me to get a nice neat join and I was delighted that it took oxidising so well - as an Easy paste I didn't expect it to. So I left the back of the pendant with a dark gunmetal finish as a potential alternative way to wear it.


I made my first pair of cufflinks for a Christmas gift and I'll write more about the process and inspiration behind the pattern I etched in a later blog.

All tied up in knots

I've blogged several times in the past about how working on one thing takes you down a particular design path - how one idea leads to another and you produce a series of related pieces, often on a theme. Thus it was this week. A returning customer asked me to make a pair of earrings for her that were an amalgamation of two designs already available in my shop - she liked one element of each design and wanted them combining.

Thankfully, with my recent discipline of keeping a detailed journal of my designs with sizes, gauges of wire used and the tools and methods I'd used to make a particular shape, I was easily able to re-create the elements in question, faithfully to the original design and without the very frustration that led me to that practice in the first instance.

Please click on any of the photographs to see a larger view.

The custom earrings I made this week - using the double looped rosebud knot, but with rosy buds at the bottom, where the originals had a wrapped stone dangling.

Once you've torn your hair out trying to re-make an old design and not been able to get it quite the same as the original, you realise the real value in disciplining yourself to maintain such records religiously. It was with some degree of smugness that I first flipped the pages to find my design 'recipe' for something I needed to re-make and a practice that has proven itself time and time again. The fact that my husband gave me a lovely leather bound book for just this purpose last Christmas has made it a particular pleasure to work in.

When I work, I always jot down the length of wire I cut and the diameter of any turns or loops and if I find I have too much waste, or struggle to finish the shape with too short a piece, I make the adjustment in my notes too. If I find that a particular method doesn't work and I find working from the back, or anticlockwise, for example, cures a problem or gives rise to a better shape, then this is also noted.

Whilst fiddling with my double looped knots, I wondered how well they would work as a single loop with a rosebud knot at one end and I rather liked the results.

We've all done it, had problems making something, found a solution, then come to remake it some time later, fall into the same initial difficulty and can't remember what we did to cure it the first time around. So my journal is used to note all such details, with sketches and diagrams where appropriate. I even note which tools I used if I found that one item worked better than another.

Having made a single loop pair of earrings (above), I wondered how heavy I could go with the wire and made this pendant in 1.6mm (14 gauge) copper wire. The loop is just over an inch (27mm) in diameter.

I've got into the practice of making scribbles on scraps of paper or in my sketch book as I work, which I treat much like we did with a 'rough book' at school - I do all my working out in that, then transpose my final version (which may have been amended or adjusted several times by the time I'm done) to my neater finished journal - so that it's hopefully easier to make sense of at some time in the future.

The matching set of rosebud knot loop pendant and earrings. I've oxidised the copper pieces and then tumbled them extensively to get a nice gunmetal colour on the dark areas, then polished just the rosebuds back to highlight them.

I tend to sit down after breakfast, whilst I finish my coffee, before the day starts to veer away from my intended plans, and transpose all my scratty notes into the journal before I lose them, or lose my train of thought. The investment of time in doing this has proven well worth it on many occasions. I also have this thought in the back of my mind that at some time a long way in the future, my great-grandchildren may find it a fascinating treasure the same way that I do my grandfathers old sketch book - a little glimpse into my life at this time.

Now I was on a roll I wanted to see how they'd look in Sterling silver. I didn't have the same gauge of wire, so these are a little more delicate than the copper version of the earrings, but I decided to leave these as shiny silver, rather than oxidise them.

And so it was this week with these custom earrings. I consulted my design journal to make the same knotted loop element again and once my fingers had remembered the technique required to get a nice even knot, I set about making several other pieces using the same elements, as above. Once you start with something, your mind just takes you where it will and I still have ideas left to try using the same techniques.

Necessity is the mother of a new design

Anyone in the UK this week can't have failed to have noticed the news and conversation dominating cold and snowy snap. It's been unseasonably cold and with rather more snow than the UK is equipped to cope with.

Whilst making dinner on Monday evening, we found that we had no hot water coming out of the taps and the boiler was failing to fire when expected, resulting also in fast-cooling radiators. After wafting a warm hair drier over the external condensate pipes (lagged during last December's cold snap when they froze and stopped the heating working temporarily) in the vain hope that was all there was causing it, but we couldn't get the boiler to fire and it was now leaking water too and showing a fault indicator. Time to call in the experts.

Please click on any of the photographs for a larger view.

It ended up a somewhat unusual fault that took some finding and we were consequently without a working boiler for several days. It just goes to show how pampered we've become and how much we take such things for granted. I'm old enough to have lived before central heating was commonplace and yet find myself totally disrupted by the removal of on tap hot water and warm rooms.


So my work routine was somewhat interrupted this week - my usual work area was far too cold to work effectively and as I take photographs on the end of my work bench, I couldn't even comfortably get on with my backlog of those either. Maybe I'm just soft, but trying to grip cold tools with cold fingers just wasn't fun - and as a Reynauds sufferer, actually painful - and potentially dangerous. Time for Plan B.

So as I had a birthday gift I wanted to make this week and various as yet unopened supplies, I gave some thought to a project I could work on with minimal space and tools, sitting somewhere warmer. I had this idea in mind anyway, so gave it some more thought as it would fit the bill; something I could work on at the kitchen table whilst remaining on hand to assist the repair man who visited several times to try and fix the boiler.

I wanted to make something in antiqued copper and using some brown Lucite leaf charms I'd bought. I had in mind a random, clustered necklace with berries and copper buds - something vine-like and autumnal. I wanted it to be busy and full and tinkle when moving and I had an idea that I'd supplement the leaf charms with some copper leaves of my own making.

So I started tinkering initially with a scrap of chain and the design evolved. I wanted to make it a party type feature necklace that would sit well in the open V of a blouse or top, so worked on the shape to make the central section deep in the centre and tapering back to the chain.

The Lucite leaves have been supplemented with graduating sizes of wrapped copper leaf spirals and hand formed leaf shapes. The berries are carnelian, jasper, goldstone, sardonix and green opals. I chose to use large balled headpins so that the buds would also become a visual feature too. I used several wrapping techniques to add some variety of shape and randomness to the necklace. Random of this nature is not something that comes easily to me, I always end up with a distinct and symmetrical pattern and that is the case to some degree here, but I tried to loosen my grip a little on being too precise.

I hand polished and filed all the cut ends of the metal components and oxidised the whole necklace and hand polished it back to an antiqued finish, to enhance the textures of the wrapping and spiralling and show off the red highlights of the berries. I hope that she'll like it. I have enough supplies left to make one more, so will enjoy making another to put on sale.