Kelly Snelling - A Charming Exchange: 25 Jewelry Projects To Create & Share

A CHARMING EXCHANGE
25 Jewelry Projects to Create & Share

Kelly Snelling & Ruth Rae

NORTH LIGHT BOOKS
CINCINNATI, OHIO
www.mycraftitvity.com

A CHARMING EXCHANGE. copyright2008 by KellySnelling & Ruth Rae. Manufactured in China. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote a brief passage in review. Published by North Light Books, an imprint of F+W Publications, Inc., 4700 East Galbraith Road, Cincinnati, Ohio 45236. (800) 289-0963. First edition.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Snelling, Kelly and Rae, Ruth.
A charming exchange. / author. - - 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60061-051- 6 (alk. paper)
eISBN: 978-1-4402-2515-4
1. Jewelry making. I . Title.
TT000.G00 2008
000.00--dc00

0000000000

EDITOR: TONIA DAVENPORT

COVER DESIGNER: MARISSA BOWERS

INTERIOR DESIGNER: JENNIFER HOFFMAN

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR: GREGNOCK

PHOTO STYLIST: JAN NICKUM

PHOTOGRAPHERS: TIM GRONDIN, AL PARRISH & CHRISTINE POLOMSKY

METRIC CONVERSION CHART

DEDICATIONS

For Tom, Finnigan
& Morgan,
who give my life
constant joy.

Kelly

To my amazing family,
thank you all for supporting
my crazy, compulsive nature
to create for days&weeks at a time!
Thank you for allowing me
the space in which I need
to grow&express myself.
Without your love, I would be lost!

Ruth

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the fabulous group of artists who participated in this collaboration with us. Thank you for your talents, trust, inspiration and friendship. Thank you to our amazing editor, Tonia Davenport, and the wonderfully creative staff at North Light. We so appreciate your excellent guidance and keen organizational abilities. You all made this entire endeavor much easier and oh-so-much more fun. Lastly, we would like to thank our families for their constant support, encouragement and willingness to let us be crazy jewelry-making women at all hours without our homes falling down around us.

CONTENTS

Magic Among Members
{INTRODUCTION}

Making Jewelry
{BASIC TOOLS & SUPPLIES}

Collaborate or Swap?
{BOTH ARE FUN!}

We will surely get to our destinationif we join hands.

Aung San Suu Kyi

MAGIC AMONG MEMBERS

{INTRODUCTION}

It is late: The children are finally asleep, the doghas stopped his click, click, clicking behind you,and now you are alone. You can think. This iswhen the magic starts bubbling.

The art we create is an expression of who we are and how we see the world. Seeds of inspiration can come from one thousand things in an average day: flowers in the garden, a sunset, the evening news or even silence. An artists gift is to miraculously conjure something from nothing, to turn a dream into a piece of art. Most artists do this all alone.

With the growing number of online art groups, a cloistered regimen doesnt have to be the only way. Even if you live in a tiny town devoid of an artist community, you have the entire world at your fingertips to collaborate with you.

Different from a typical how-to jewelry book, this book contains projects that were collaborations between a group of women, from several countries, of varying skills and talentsartists from many different mediums. You can make the projects in this book by yourself and create lovely pieces. But you can also learn to find inspiration by working with other artists to produce collaborative pieces that can take you down a completely new and exciting artistic path.

That is how this book was born. We all collided on the way to the grocery store of artistic inspiration. It was the summer of 2006. Ruth and I were strangers who had recently joined an online professional artists group.

Among this group were frequent, collaborative projects and exchanges between the members. Ruth decided to host her first exchange with a charm swap. I had never made any real sort of jewelry before, but when I saw the artists who were signing up to participate, I couldnt stand to miss out on the experience.

When Ruth began this first exchange, she had no idea just how much her mind would be opened. Her background is in metalsmithing, and she had always kept her jewelry work separate from her mixed-media art. By hosting the charm swap she discovered that she could bring the two disciplines together.