If you don’t follow me on twitter (and IF you don’t, it’s a shame. I have come up with something truly awesome for the advent countdown…. Follow me here!! – you’ll have missed me dying my hair orange and white earlier this week too. It’s too late now!! It’s back to blondish again, but I did have a couple of important meetings looking like I had had an egg fight in a TippEx factory. AND I didn’t even cry. Not even once. I am grown up.)
You may also have missed the announcement that I was working on a design for the latest British Jewellers’ Association competition. This time it’s one to design a Cocktail Ring.
Cocktail Rings aren’t my specialty – as you can probably deduce from the massive number and variety of them I have never made – but I create things. I design jewellery and I know what looks nice. I’ll have a good stab at it….
And as I said in the tweet, It’ll blow your collective bum clean off.
So… this is how I work…(I wish this wasn’t so accurate).
- Instantly come up with a title for the Cocktail Ring I want to make. No idea what the piece involves or what it will look like but this time I was convinced that it would end up being called “DISCO WOLF GOES ON HOLIDAY”. Suffice to say, it won’t end up being called that – or anything like that.
- Spend a couple of weeks scribbling on post-it notes, inventing something absolutely impossible to make in the time. And too small for a catwalk cocktail ring. And not colourful enough. And barely functional. But it fits the title.
- Decide instead to listen to sanity and go for something completely different.
- Again with the post it notes and tiny pieces of paper, researching idea 2 until it is all I can think about… then realise that this is even more complicated than idea 1. And will take forever to make and at least 2 complex mechanisms… and springs….Decide to forge ahead.
- Speak to someone about it and note that they respond much more favourably to idea 1 than to idea 2.
- Procrastinate by doing other things – e.g….. dye own hair white and orange.
- Chat to a friend – who reminds me that I was talking about doing a design with this animal at some stage…wouldn’t that be cool?
- Realise that I have had a Kinder Surprise toy of this animal sitting in front of my face (balanced on the computer!!) for the past 5 months.
- Design Cocktail Ring (in about 2 minutes).
Horribly true. It will be brilliant though. …. (I hope)
just a quick note, each of the pages you can see is the front of a little booklet …of 8 pages…. I’ve been taking these EVERYWHERE…
Note – I make these books (perfectly pocket sized) from a single sheet of paper, using this method I found on Etsy a couple of years ago.
It is so much better than paper for note making and mechanism sketches – you also get a neat little buzz every time you complete one – which is quite regularly seeing as they only have 8 pages…. Use and enjoy – and of course you don’t have to stick to A4 paper…
AND if you go to the PocketMod site , they have coded loads of very useful drag and drop pages for you to print onto your paper to transform it into a RIDICULOUSLY useful little cheap thing…. Those clever, altruistic humans…They deserve love and money and toast with good things on it.
If you’ve got a little more time, you might want to go even further….. This is a fantastic animated tutorial for making a slightly more complex larger notebook – with just tabs and slots holding it together – and glitter!
http://www.designlovefest.com/2012/04/make-it-10-2/ Kudos to D E S I G N L O V E F E S T for this. It’s chuffin’ genius.
More news… I am hopelessly addicted to Masterchef the Professionals – mainly for Monica’s face, but also for the food, I suppose. I love the premise of the show coming up on Monday, in which the 4 finalists are going to be given a load of manky kitchen scraps from which they have to produce something awe-inspiring and terribly fancy.
After work, I find it tricky to bring myself to even open the fridge, let alone do anything more complex than stare at its contents… these people are alchemists…I want a takeaway. Or toast with good things on it.