Borders Green Festival 2011

This weekend is the 7th annual Borders Green Festival starting on Saturday 2nd July from 12 noon until 11 pm and continuing Sunday 3rd July from 11 am until 5.30 pm at Five Arches Playing Fields, Tweedmouth, Berwick upon Tweed. 

There will be music, workshops, archery and a whole host of green themed stalls!  I'll be there selling my sea glass and recycled silver / copper jewellery and have a load of lovely new pieces nearly ready for their first public showing!


Hope to see you there!  Do come and introduce yourself!
 

Five Arches Playing Fields

A698, Ord Road, Tweedmouth, Berwick upon Tweed.

Post code: TD15 2UT

Next to Berwick Fire Station and railway viaduct.

Limited parking near by in Allan Brothers and General Mills car parks - signed.

Mid June Garden

Copper Star

This morning I was sawing out a star shape from a piece of recycled copper tubing. A the tube has been flattened I end up with two shaped pieces from one sawing session, which makes earrings a tad easier! The copper is tarnished and dull on the surface open to the air, however, as you saw you get lots of sparkly copper dust appearing.

Once the shape has been cut out there is usually a small hinge where the pipe is still joined which lets you prise apart the two shapes and have a look at what's inside. . .
This piece has a beautiful range of greens and once I've filed and sanded the edges I may well wax one star to maintain the patina and pickle the other to get a lovely clean copper.

Workroom Wednesday

This week's workroom photo brings you little copper hearts and dots sawn out of recycled copper water pipes being soldered onto sterling silver wire. These will form the base of two pairs of sea glass earrings, in fact, the dots have already been made up with dark cola brown coloured glass and they look rather autumnal. Must be all this rain we are having leading me towards thought of a cooler season!

Lily Lolo Mineral Make Up

Music videos and now make up reviews?! Have I transformed my blog into some sort of style magazine?!

No, no, no but I have discovered a make up I dig so I'm sharing it with you lovely people as I know some of you are interested in environmentally friendly living and this stuff helps.

Lily Lola mineral cosmetics have "achieved cult status by beautifully harmonising natural, chemical free ingredients with the ultimate in mineral based technology", have BUAV approval and are made in the UK.

I started investigating mineral make up after reading about the giant list of nasties in most regular liquid foundations and thought I really don't need to be slapping that crap on my face. Initial investigations led me to expensive brands and I let it drop. Then, when R asked me to marry him I inevitably started thinking wedding thoughts and wanting to look decent on the day seemed a good excuse to research a little further.

A few months ago I discovered Lily Lola and ordered the sample set pictured above which gives you three different colours of foundation, allowing you to colour match to your own skin before ordering, a face powder and a mini kabuki brush for application. I was quite excited to recieve the pretty box and even photoraphed a before and after to see how the make up looked. The foundation feels much lighter than the liquid foundation I was using and gives a much more natural look, I don't wear heavy make up so I liked this aspect a lot.

All very pleasing and I thought I would order a full size foundation in my shade of choice. However, the best was yet to come. Those of you in the UK may remember a few weeks ago we had heat. The sun came out for a week and it was delightful. Well, usually at such times I have to slap on the factor 50 and no matter what type of face sun cream I use I end up feeling slimy and get spotty. Bleugh. Whilst not having an official SPF rating Lily Lola mineral cosmetics do have natural sun protection and, having tentatively put it to the test I can confirm I did not burn even slightly! I feel like I have to put this in context of just how good this is with an example from a few years ago when I was one of the teachers on a Duke of Edinburgh exhibition in the Peak District, in the rain wearing an SPF moisturiser; I got sun burned apart from the nice white stripe across my forehead where my head band had been. Forshame.

Anyway, so the make up is grand stuff and not very expensive. A large pot of foundation costs £12.49 plus p&P and judging by the small amounts required at a time this should last a fair while. I highly recommend a peruse around the Lily Lolo website for more information, including a stack of useful videos on how to apply mineral make up.


I was so impressed I bought my sister the trial kit for her birthday. To offer balance to this review I must add that she is slightly less convinced of the merits of the make up because of the transformation of her artfully arranged boudoir into something from a low budget junkie film due to the spatterings of powdery residue decorating her dressing table.

Feist

I've had a bit of a Feist feast this week and she is splendid. This is the first Feist video I saw a number of years ago, it suited my mood at the time and the photography geek in me loved it instantly! I want to share all the videos with you at once - Sesame Street and toast with wings should be a part of life. However, I know we all have work to do, so just one for today, enjoy!

Workroom Wednesday

This picture was taken yesterday before the bangles had their final polish and were packaged up to be sent to Crown Studio, Rothbury. I do love them and it was nice to see four worn at once, very jangly! There are four more on the bench at the moment nearing completion and a stack of pretty sea glass droplets awaiting the drill.

Tomorrow is the last day of the PTLLS course and so I'll be done with essay writing just in time to get ready for a month of essay marking! I am trying not to panic and am so thankful for new opportunities which have appeared in the last week, I just hope I can get it all done!

This is about me done for today as it's netball night, time to run and leap around for a bit,

Good evening to you all xo

Recycled Silver

Hello!

I have been working away with my first delivery of recycled silver wire and am very happy with the supplier. If you are interested in using recycled silver you can order directly from Capella Ltd and I'm hoping to bring you further information on the company soon.

Arm Sculpture by Ute Decker

Last week Ute Decker's newsletter appeared in my inbox and included this little nugget:

Interested in Chain
in 100% Recycled Silver?

I have found a UK chain maker who would be willing to make chain in 100% recylced silver.

The more jewellers the cheaper the chain.

If you are interested, please send me an email with "Chain" in the subject line and roughly how many meters of chain you might need per quater or 6 month. Once I have more details I / the chain maker will get in touch with you.

Email: eco@utedecker.com
Subject: Chain

This would be an excellent step forward as fine chain is now the only part of my silver jewellery which is not made from recycled metal. If you are interested I hope you will email; offering ethical and environmentally friendly jewellery is not just a good thing for your business.

Workroom Wednesday

Bangles, a ring, some copper sea weed inspire shapes and a bezel set pendant on the go today. My delayed silver arrived special delivery this morning, hooray! Looking at this picture shows a lot of fluxy mess on the slate and bench, it looks like bird poo, but it's not, I promise. I must have a clean once I'm caught up on making.