Kate Selene

Cufflinks in the new year

I have been settling into my new job over the past few months, and running both the Blacksmithing degree and the Jewellery degree has been awesome, but I'm really starting to miss my workshop!

I have been busy designing new cufflinks, it's quite hard not to feel inspired when your around such enthusiastic students all the time, and these will be appearing in the shop in the new year. I just thought I share a photo of a set of cufflinks that were made for a wedding this year, I will update you soon with workshop activities and some of the work my guys have been producing over the last few months!

Cheerio for now

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New wedding dress rings and paper sculpture!

I have been working my little fingers to the bone of late as Christmas is approaching fast, and so are the Christmas weddings. It must be so romantic to get married at Christmas, if only we had some snow to just make it picture perfect! I have been making some new pieces to go into the shop during the last week, and Im so excited that these are finished because they really do look like precious stones, and they are made using wedding dress fabric.

I must say, I am particularly pleased with the heart version, its just so tiny! All of the shapes are available in the shop in any size that you wish, and each ring comes with two slim textured silver bands to make it a trio.

 On a different note altogether, yesterday Dave and I (Dave is a very talented demonstrator who is my right hand man in the workshop) gave a paper sculptur workshop yesterday to a group of students, and there were some really exciting pieces produced. The one above was made by Dave, as is the one below. they are my favourite of the day simply because it made the pages of the books compleatly different.

To produce the paper sculptures, all we did was fold the pages of the book, so that they were all the same, and the formed really solid 3D pieces. Dave left this one half finished and added an image of a man for the National Geographic, and it works so well!

Mine was a little bit less exciting, but I was so impressed with the forms that you can produce that i just got a bit carried away. This book was sliced using the bansaw so that the pages could have a distinctive fold in them.  My paper sculptures have now been added to my desk at work which is taking on a life of its own!

Ok, time to do some lecturing work!

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Throwing the bouquet!

This afternoon, whilst making ring pillows and reading through a wedding magazine (purely research, honest!) I stumbed upon something really interesting! I have never know why women throw their bouquets at their wedding, but now I know!

'In medieval times, a bide's dress was deemed lucky, and guests would tear pieces off to keep a lucky charm. To avoid desroying the dress, brides began to throw personal items, such as a garter or bouquet, and this later developend into the superstition that the next girl to catch the bouquet would be the next to marry.'

How amazing! In some way In my wedding I stuck to the origionall tradition, as I actually gave pieces of my dress away, good job really because I kept my bouquet!


 
So whilst reading and getting carried away thinking about weddings, I was finishing some ring pillows, they are now available in the shop,and thinking about my ring pillow. My Best friend and fellow (very pregnant) crafter (Ditsy designs) made me a beautiful ring pillow made from pieces of my dress and the bridesmaids dresses, it was perfect, and it was such a personal touch! I then took another trip down memory lane before photographing the work to go in the shop.
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Wedding Dress ring

 

This is only a quick post, but I just had to share it with you because im so excited about it! I made myself a little ring out of my own wedding dress. I get so much work in for other people I forget that I don't have a copy of my own work!

 

So yes, this is my favourite piece so far (you will notice the regular pattern of my lastest work being my favourite!) and I have just made a charm bangle set with my dress and also an innitial tag with 'KSW + JP' on it (Jon Poate is my husband), so when I get round to taking some decent pictures they will be available for purchase ( with your wedding dress in of course, you don't want mine) in the shop.

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Raspberry sweetie pendant!! I just love it!

 

I have literaly had this resin piece in my tool box for about a year, not knowing what to do with it, yet not wanting to get rid of it (other pieces have fallen foul to this routine!)

 

every time I saw it, it just looked to lushious to get rid of, and now it is my new favourite piece of jewellery! I made a lovely thick bezel to go round it with a large bail link at the top so that I loop on of my oxidised chains through it!

 

I may be the only one who see's the deliciousness of this spangly new piece, and thats OK, I will wear it with pride, and I may even match my shoes to it, maybe even a red belt!

 

I have also compleated my wedding fabric cufflink samples over the last few days, there are more from this range to come and the orders are comming in thick and fast! Remeber, I love to hear from you, get in touch!

toodle pip!

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My favourite so far . . . . . . . .

Honestly, the requests I recieve for the personalised cufflinks have been very entertaining and rather obsqure at times, however, this pair is one of my favourite becuase it has such an adorable story behind the choice of words! At first I thought it may have been a spelling mistake, but they are actually words from the mama musical, and the lady who bought them said that her daughter say's this to her husband and it makes him go all gooey with love! Aaaaah! so cute!



Over the weekend I will be putting together my wedding packages, and the wedding season is upon us and I want to make your life as easy as possible when shopping for gifts for your wedding party. There will be two types of packages, one will be the customised collection with fabric used to create the jewellery, and the other collection will feature my floral pieces, the stude the earrings and the fabric flower booches like the one above.



I will also be listing the jewellery wraps I have been steadily stocking up over the last couple of months, there are full size ones and also some small handbag size jewellery wraps! I have made them in a variety of colours and fabrics, but there are some bautiful Duponi Silk wraps for wedding gifts, as you can never go wrong with jewellery wraps as gifts! I will keep you updated on the Wedding collections and the wraps, in the meen time, enjoy the sunshine!
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