Overthinking the whole packaging thing... plus pink topaz

I have spent about three weeks looking at different options for jewellery boxes and packaging... and I'm completely stuck. I've worked out that ideally, I need boxes which:
- are pretty, modern, and a nice colour
- can be printed on the outside with my logo
- don't have a ridiculous minimum order number
- do not cost £££

So... not an overly demanding list of requirements, right? But perhaps I am too fussy - what I really don't want are cheap cardboard boxes. My ideal box is something elegant and pretty like this:

...but unfortunately I would need to order 1000 minimum in each size. Ah. Perhaps not then.

So, I've finally whittled down the suppliers to just two options, and I think I've made my mind up at last (in the absence of anything better!): I think I will go for these boxes from Potters instead of these from Finer Packaging because a) Finer can't print on the outside of the lid, only inside; b) their minimum order for printing is 100 per size.



Any other packaging suppliers I should check out? Am I making the right choice?

In other news, I made this modern pink topaz ring on the weekend. It has a high bezel made from 0.5mm sheet, and a hammered band.

The hammered band...

Fits me well... perhaps I should keep this for me?

Cufflinks

I've been making lots of cufflinks lately. My friend owns a shop in Woodstock, Oxfordshire - The Cotswold Tailor, and so I've come up with a few solid silver cufflink designs to create samples for the shop. He also owns a tailoring company, so I thought personalised monogrammed cufflinks would be a nice partner to a bespoke suit.

It's also giving me a chance to play with my new stamps... not as easy as I first thought, but annealing is definitely the key! The cufflink fittings are from Cookson Gold.

Once I've finished making these samples, I've got a few more complex design ideas for rings / pendants that I'm looking forward to attempting soon, plus I have a few opals and pretty stones I need to set.

  

Filigree and claw setting pendant

Oh dear, life has been a bit hectic recently - spending time with family, going on holiday, etc - so haven't really had a lot of spare time to blog. I shall make a promise to myself to try and post at least once a week!

In June, I made this for my nearly-Step-Mother's birthday, at an all-day workshop with Amy Surman. I really wanted to try making a claw setting from scratch, and thought I'd attempt filigree at the same time! This took about 6 hours - very time consuming but quite ambitious given the number of new techniques I was trying, and there are a crazy number of soldering joints in this one piece (probably 40-ish?!). Most of this piece was made using different sizes of wire (1.2mm-ish square wire, 0.8mm for the setting and some of the structure, 0.6 for the filigree) - I curled all the bits and just played around to see what worked, instead of following a design pattern exactly.

It was polished in a magnetic polisher - which is a nifty machine like a tiny tumbler, with tiny pins and which polishes in about 15 mins... and now I really want one.

Luckily, my nearly-step-mother really liked it, and appreciated how it was made specially for her - she has even asked me to make matching earrings for her Christmas gift, haha!