How to make jewellery from your random collections

I love making precious metal jewellery (well, thank goodness for that!) but I do love doing other things. I’ve always been a jack-of-all-trades, and a collector of hobbies (!) and sometimes these two things come together.

Last week I went on two workshops (and one was two whole days away from Bristol!) - and more on them in the future - and the second one meant taking along found objects, and general bits and bobs. I have a lot of bits and bobs! My favourites though, by a long way, are the watch parts. About 5 years ago I made a collection for the shop, Fig, which consisted of watch faces and handcut brass bees and butterflies, and in my usual way I couldn’t just buy a few old watch faces, I bought tons of them. On eBay I found several watchmakers collections being sold, and I bought lots of them! I can never quite stop myself…

A small part of my watchpart collection!

So I took a long a handful or two to the workshop and included some in a piece we made, but to do this I had to rifle through rather a lot of gorgeous tiny little bits and so before I put them away again, I decided to make a few things for the shop. These are some of the greetings cards

and six pairs of earrings (though one pair already sold via Instagram at the time of typing!).

It takes a surprising amount of time to design each card or pair of earrings and by the end of the day I’d made 10 cards and the six pairs of earrings. Not a huge amount really for about 8 hours of work, but nonetheless, really satisfying and enjoyable to turn my hand to something different for a day.