Last week I took a few days out from the Claddagh Design workshop and headed to Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. When ever I get the opportunity I love to visit other makers and spend some time researching new jewellery techniques and tools. The main reason for my trip was to attend a workshop under jeweller Richard Witek.
As well as attending this great masterclass on fine jewellery techniques, I used my time in the jewellery quarter to research and buy some new tools for the workshop. I found it hard to restrict my spending and so there was a few stressful moments in airport baggage check-in wondering would my suitcase full of tools make it under the weight restrictions! Thankfully a bag of jewellery tools doesn't weight as much as you might think :)
During my time on the course I had the opportunity to work on new designs for the Claddagh Design collection. We were invited to bring along projects we were working on to see how we could apply the skills we learnt to these pieces. I'm really excited to be able to give you a sneak peek at just some of these. Our silver Celtic Cross is one of our most popular pieces and we often get asked for bespoke versions so I wanted to expand the range we offer.
Making a Celtic cross from silver is a complex job as there are so many tiny components that go into giving it that distinctive form. And of course just to make things even more complicated I decided to introduce some other Celtic elements that I had found while researching Celtic Cross artwork.
Here's the piece as a work in progress, I'll post some photos of the finished article once it's finished.