Belle Armoire Jewelry

With 160 pages of tips and ideas, you won’t want to miss In Her Studio where artists showcase the places where they create and share the thought processes behind developing their unique spaces. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE UP TO $20 Previous issues, and select digital downloads, also available. AVAILABLE NOW In Her Studio is now available on newsstands. Look inside the Winter 2023 edition, and order your copy at inherstudiomagazine.com or by calling 1-877-782-6737.…

DEAR FRIENDS, We launched Belle Armoire Jewelry more than 15 years ago and it has obviously evolved over the years. Through various jewelry styles, crafting trends, and magazine designs, we have done our best to meet the needs of the mixed-media jewelry-making community. As with everything in life, change is inevitable — and most of the time welcome. In fact, I think change is actually vital to an artist’s creative process. I’ve managed Belle Armoire Jewelry since 2019, and have been part of its editorial team since 2009, so I have read the stories and insights of many jewelry artisans. Of the many morsels of wisdom I’ve enjoyed on these pages, one that pops up again and again actually deals with the topic of change. We’re all aware that most…

I love winter — everything outside is so still and subdued, and all the colors are soft and muted. Winter is like a blank canvas waiting for an explosion of color. It is the perfect season for creating. Clay is wonderful for making jewelry. It begins life as a lump of wet material taken from the earth, and it can be made into nearly any shape. Commercial glazes give the forms life, and they come in a full range of saturated, predictable colors, perfect for adding a pop of loud color to any quiet winter’s day. I am not a purist when it comes to using molds and adding texture — anything is fair game. I like to use cake-decorating molds and cutters as well as rubber stamps, leaves, sticks,…

My personal style is very much about soft layers, flowing textures, and anything organic. Geometric shapes are a good contrast to that softer sensibility, and I don’t often think to utilize such simplicity and structure unless I’m creating a necklace around a pre-created pendant from another artist. I thought creating some focal pieces from scratch with a blend of that contrast could be interesting. Plus, I wanted to challenge myself in a new way using the beginner-level soldering skills I am practicing. Proper metalsmithing is a larger commitment than I am ready for, given the equipment cost, the supply variety, and the studio space needed. But soldering with lead-free, low-temperature solder and a soldering iron is very simple, forgiving, and compact — something that I can do at the family…

It was one of those directionless days in my mosaic studio: I was playing around with color fields, considering the relationships between colors and the effects they have on one another. I was not focused on any outcome, just combining brightly colored tiles into simple compositions on my workbench. I was suddenly inspired to dust off my stash of colorful stained glass. Although I normally opt for chunkier, textural tesserae, sheet glass seemed like the perfect material to translate vivid, abstract compositions into mosaic. I grabbed a few larger pendant trays and began playing with the random glass scraps I’d been gifted. It was awkward and frustrating at first; I had the tools I needed but had limited experience working with glass, and the small pendant trays challenged my patience…

It is a good thing to step back every once in a while and think about the creative phases of life. I have made jewelry most of my life. As a young child, I made matching jewelry for myself and my dolls. Eventually I started making jewelry for my friends, which was just plain fun. I was selling my work for extra cash by the time I was in college, and later launched a small business (Laurelynn Art Jewelry). In my mind, the reasons why I make particular pieces are just as important as the techniques and inspiration behind them. At heart I am a wire worker; it is the one area of jewelry-making that I use in almost everything I make. I learned wire wrapping in my late teens…