Artist feature: Joy Tan

One of her more elaborate
designs.

I haven't featured any artists before (other than me, haha) so this is a first. Joy featured one of my items on her blog, somebody spotted it, and I want to use this feature to thank Joy for the sale I got through her. That and I really love her work. She is located in Singapore and is a woman of many talents - she does both painting and jewelry making. She works with metal clay, just like me.


How and when did you start making jewelry?
Haha, my start was in fact not special at all. I was trained as a Fine Arts Artist so making jewelry never came into my mind and I am someone who like to see the sparkles of the jewelry instead of wearing them. About 2 years ago, a friend from England introduced me to Etsy. I was very excited and impressed by the handmade spirit I had seen in that website until I spent hours and nights amazed by the handmade items. After further considerations, I started to borrow related books from the library and bought some materials to make some simple earrings and bracelets. 

An example of Joy's dainty flower
pendants, a dandelion

What do you like best in the jewelry making process?
I enjoyed the process in creating delicate details when making art clay silver pendants. I love the quiet and peaceful moments that I am experiencing during it. I never really attends any jewelry lesson, so creating something new with art clay silver on my own contributes to much achievements and satisfactions.What inspires you?
God's nature is my very first mean of inspirations. Etsy is a really good place for ideas and references. Joining the Aspiring Metalsmith Team in Etsy really helps me a lot as many of the hardcore metalsmiths there are very very knowledgeable with torches, metals, hammer and many other materials I never know....haha....and mostly gratefully, they are very friendly to share related information. 

Joy has been experimenting with
adding dyed concrete to her designs.
I love the result!

What are the advantages and challenges of having a handmade jewelry business in your location?
What I have created is considered something new and rare in Singapore as the local people have little knowledge of art clay silver, so I will just need more efforts to start this market. On the other hand, due to the great focus on mass production in this country, people are rather focused more on branded items and icons. Little appreciation is given to handmade items as they are not so educated with the efforts that a artisan spends in creating something and resources are limited here too.

How does a design come to you?
I have the habit of looking at any creations around me even if it is small and I will sketch on my small note book with things that are interesting. I will try to depict the idea in different compositions then I'll choose the best one. Sometimes, I will just make the jewelry instinctively. 


Thank you Joy! Those of you who would like to see more of her beautiful jewelry, make sure to check out her Etsy shop.

Thing a Week- Weeks 13-15

Another combined Thing A Week report. So far so good, I haven't yet had a week where I haven't finished something, which is a good sign. I must say that it has been really hard to stay indoors with the wonderful spring weather we've had lately. We'll see if I'm able to keep up the good work..

Week 13

This is my first project in gold. I'm not sure I would have done it if not a colleague had requested these earrings. She had seen similar earrings by me in silver and wanted them in 18K gold.
So I ordered the tiniest amount of supplies possible and got started. And I can now say: I love gold! It was extremely nice to work with, except for the awareness that the gold dust that I can't possibly collect when sawing or filing is a loss that I'll have to accept. And another thing that wasn't so nice is the thought that stays in your brain as long as you work with it: Must. Not. Screw. Up.
The 'phew' feeling when I had polished them and set the stones was pretty big. And oh yes, my colleague bought them.

Week 14

This week I managed to continue doing things I am uncomfortable with. This time it was prongs. I have a few prong projects, some of which are finished, some of which may never get finished. I had tried this particular design before and had a hard time soldering on all the prongs. This time I drilled holes where I wanted the prongs, then hammered a little nail head on a piece of wire and put the wire through the holes with the nail head in the back. Then soldered all of them at the same time. Easy! The stone is a wonderful translucent mint green prehnite, rounded both on the front and in the back.




Week 15

This was another custom order, and again a challenge for me. A colleague (a different one) gave me a stone she had once been given. She didn't know what it was but it looks like quartz or white topaz. The challenge was to set a big (and high) faceted stone in a simple, elegant pendant. I did most of the pendant at my metalsmithing class, and currently I cannot repeat the way that it was done at home - though there are other ways. I made a sterling silver oval ring that matched the stone as prefectly as possible. Then I ground a seat for the stone and made the rest of the pendant with round wire. I used a hammer hand piece for flexshafts to set the stone, and then polished the area around the setting.

Finally, spring!

For winter's rains and ruins are over, 

And all the season of snows and sins; 

The days dividing lover and lover, 

The light that loses, the night that wins; 

And time remembered is grief forgotten, 

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 

And in green underwood and cover 

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Algernon Charles Swinburne  (1837–1909)

We are lucky this year. The thick layer of snow has melted away fast, and right now we're enjoying some warm days that are almost like summer! Every day new flowers pop up, and you have to make sure you look around every day or you miss most of the fun. Ahh, spring. :)

Thing a Week- Weeks 10-12

I'm getting worse. Now I'm writing one blog post about three entries for my 2011 Thing a Week challenge. Oh well. One blog post is better than none!

So, my week 10 items is a little different in that it's a PMC item. PMC is Precious Metal Clay, and this is the material that made me a jewelry-making-holic. The reason why I haven't had many PMC items in my Thing a Week challenges is that I mostly use PMC in non-challenging ways. If you're too broad with the techniques you use, and you don't have all the time in the world, you have to pick and choose which technique you want to dive deeper into and which technique you want to maintain but not refine. Currently I'm not refining my PMC technique too much, but I got a request for an orchid pendant. Luckily I have two flowering orchids at the moment and I asked one of them if I could have a flower. I interpreted the answer as 'yes, but only if I get nutrition in my water every week while I flower instead of once every two weeks'. Okay, deal! I dissected the flower and used every part to make a silver orchid flower. This is the result:

Week 11 is this ring:

My inspiration for this ring was a beautiful Art Nouveau opal ring, with platinum leaves framing the stone, and tiny diamonds set into the leaves. I have no idea how to even attempt something like that, and the ring I saw may have been cast, but I loved that the leaves formed the setting of the stone. This is my first attempt at such a design, and it's not entirely like what I had in mind, but I will definitely explore this again. I have listed it on Etsy and called it the 'sunny garden ring'. The stone is a beautiful red brown sunstone with multicolored glitters that sparkle in the sun.

Week 12 is a ring with a raw tourmaline crystal. I set it between two H-shaped pieces of silver and folded the corners over. Steady like a rock :) 

The back plate is a piece of reticulated silver I made a while back. For the longest time I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it, so it was on my bench along with a lot of other small pieces of silver. But then I got the tourmaline and it looked rather nice on top of the reticulated silver. 

I love how the stone looks with the sun shining on it!

That's all for now. I have no idea what my next creation will be. :)

Thing a Week- 8 and 9

For these Things a Week I have actually stepped out of my comfort zone. It's not always easy to do so. Like with everything, you need time, a healthy dose of optimism, and a certain disregard for things that can go wrong (especially with the silver price being as high as it is).

Week #8:

These filigree moonstone earrings are made with traditional filigree patterns and thin twisted filigree wire. Making filigree is tricky because of the thin wire and the many soldering points - always a risk for melting. Time will tell if these were a result of beginner's luck or if I have finally learned to control my torch a little.

Week #9:

This little hedgehog has been sculpted in metal clay. I don't sculpt much, but I'd like to do more of it, especially with results like these. I made the sterling silver band of the ring in a wavy pattern, to symbolize the erratic way animals sometimes walk when following  their noses. This little hedgehog will soon appear in my Etsy shop.

My addiction

Whenever I do fairs and markets I see how children are drawn to polished colorful stones. Sometimes a little girl or boy walks slowly by my table and touches every single stone with one finger. On one market one of the other sellers had a big bowl of 'magic stones'. They were a random mix of tumbled agate, aventurine, tiger eye, quartz, etc. They didn't cost more than $1 each but to the children they were magic treasures.


I must say, this hasn't changed. Not for me at least. I remember getting my first stone, it was a pyrite crystal. Whatever my father said to me about what it was, to me it was as valuable as solid gold. I put it on my display shelf with other pretty rocks and rinsed it whenever it got too dusty. In the end, however, it ended up in a box and I almost forgot about it.


Then I started working with silver and talking to other metalsmiths on Etsy. They were drooling over stones, licking stones, showing off new purchases.. and through them I discovered the world of cabochons. Beautiful, colorful, smoothly polished stones, made by mother nature and a talented lapidary artist. And now I could buy stones, not just for looking at, but with a Purpose! 

Since I started buying cabs, it has become a small obsession. I have to introduce stone buying moratoria to pace myself. Very few things make me so childishly happy as receiving new stones in the mail.  I have written about my stone collection before (here) where I showed off a small part of my stash. This time I won't show you my entire collection either, simply because it normally looks like this:

Baggies. They contain all vital information, the kind of stone, price, seller or origin, dimensions or carat. The way I have currently divided my stones is heat resistant (can be fired in place in metal clay), faceted, small cabs and big cabs. It's no great system but it's something. I'm open to any storage tips, btw.

So here are a few highlights:

I love purple. These are a few examples of the purple stones I have.
Charoite is a special weakness of mine.

I'm prone to buying stones of similar shades. I'm very fond of blue chalcedony and agates,
gem silica,  labradorite, larimar and Anything that is green

Fossils! I love looking at these and trying to grasp what they once were and
when that was.

These two I call my demon stones:

And this is my beloved cat paw that I will never part with:

I mentioned before that I separated big and small cabs. I love small cabs. I don't know why, but they are just extremely appealing. Don't these look like candy?

I'm not the only one who wrote about my stone collection this month. Have a look at the posts by my Aspiring Metalsmiths teamies and let them tell you about their favorites:

Autumn Bradley - http://www.autumnbradley.blogspot.com/
Clarity @ Scrollwork Designs - http://thesquarepegnation.blogspot.com/
Stacy Low - http://www.formandfunktionaccessories.blogspot.com
Chrissi Lynn Designs - http://www.chrissilynn.blogspot.com
Sylvia Anderson - http://www.sylviaanderson.blogspot.com/
Jessica @ Abella Blue - http://www.abellablue.com/blog
Contemporary Jewelry by Beatriz Fortes - http://cjbf.blogspot.com/
Esmeralda - http://jewelry-by-silverblueberry.blogspot.com/
Steph Stargell - http://www.stephstargell.com
Pennee - http://allwiredupjewelrydesigns.blogspot.com/
Silver Pearl Jewelry and Metalworks - http://silverpearlmetalworks.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/show-us-your-stones/#more-4
ArtistiKat - http://artistikat-scratchingpost.blogspot.com/
Claire - brightstar109.blogspot.com/

Thing a Week, week 6 and 7

Thing a Week #6

Is it spring soon? I thought so last week, I even saw catkins in my garden! The rest is buried in snow but catkins! That means spring soon. I was so excited that I made this pendant using metal clay:

It's not that easy to get flower imprints to show well, since petals are so delicate, but in this case it went pretty well. I put a nice ruby cab in the center. I'm happy with how this one turned out, the flower looks real and alive. :)

Thing a Week #7

I'm continuing the red theme. I have made similar earrings like these before, when I didn't know how to pick solder. Now that I can pick solder they are still a challenge! There's a lot of soldering and to make them matched is not that easy either. I left the backs of the stone settings open so the light can come through and you can see the amazing color in the stones.