Make (cold) connections!

A summertime blog post should be about fun and beating the heat. I think I’ve got just the thing for you…

Cold connections are the secret to this “Unity bracelet”

I thought I’d start this with the stylish “Unity” bracelet we’ve just added to our Design Gallery. Unity is all about joining together and making connections. So let’s talk about a hot topic — metals in jewelry — in a cool way: cold connections.

Copper is still really popular in jewelry, and now the fun metal-stamping trend has fully taken shape too. If you love the metals, but don’t want to go as far as (say) chainmaille, how do you integrate more delicate items with them?

Susan Lenart Kazmer’s book “Making Connections”

A new book in our store brings some very exciting suggestions, “Making Connections: A Handbook of Cold Joins for Jewellers and Mixed-Media Artists“, by Susan Lenart Kazmer, is full of inventive, attractive ways to unite fragile, even organic materials with metal in your jewelry designs. The results are great to look at, fun to wear, and fascinating to the touch.

The author shows you quite a range of ways to put hand tools to use in altering “found” objects, wrapping, riveting, and much more. This resource is really going to turn the crank (sorry) of the metal worker in you! You’ll also get to peruse the artist’s techniques, her sketches and projects she’s created using the ideas she teaches here.

This 143-page full-color hardback is coming to print in our Summer 2009 Supplement!

Do you have cold-connections tips of your own — or questions about this concept? Leave a comment!