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I made my clothes: Shell Tuck Edge

I'm a bit of a lazy sewer, I only sew things that are easy and if there's a way to do a short cut I'll probably find it. This lou box top is my new favourite pattern, I think it's going to make a great dress too just by adding some length. I made it in a lightweight cotton the first time and didn't feel like messing around with a facing or binding for the neckline so I tried out this shell tuck stitch (which I found by actually reading the manual for my sewing machine) I may never hem anything 'properly' ever again. It's the stitch that looks like this:

                                               

Just roll under a narrow hem and stitch so that the zig zag skips slightly off the fabric. Tightening the tension helps a bit too. On the curved neckline I only folded under a tiny bit once and then trimmed the raw edge afterwards, it's not super neat but I don't really care what my clothes look like on the inside. But straight edges work fine to fold twice so there's no raw edge. The whole thing from start to finish took less than an hour.

safety pickle

No this post has nothing to do with food. Pickle is what we call the acidic solution we put jewellery pieces into after we've been working on them with heat. Silver and gold develop firescale during soldering and need to be pickled before we can continue working. The generally accepted way to do this is to use a solution of ten percent sulphuric acid. Nasty stuff sulphuric acid though. So you can also use this super easy recipe for safety pickle. It works as well as sulphuric acid although a bit slower and does need to be heated. I keep mine in a plastic container and nuke it in the microwave for a minute. Make sure you dispose of it as safely as you would any other pickle solution though as it will contain harmful heavy metal deposits. 

white spirit vinegar

salt

Yes that really is it, I don't even measure it. Just put some white vinegar in a container and add some salt, nuke for a minute and good to go.

vintage wedding ring gets a new life

I've been hand cutting these branch rings using vintage wedding bands. It's a great way to preserve inscriptions and hallmarks on the original band whilst making it an interesting new ring. I made this one as a replacement for my wedding ring when my fingers swelled during pregnancy, I wear it on my first finger now that I'm back to normal size again. Original British hallmarks are preserved inside, it came to me in a lot with a bunch of other unwanted jewellery so unfortunately I don't know its story. Reworking old family wedding rings is a wonderful way to preserve their stories in your history.

tourmaline

Tourmaline is for sure my favourite gemstone, it comes in the most amazing array of colours and even mid quality stones look fantastic but won't break the bank either. It's mined pretty much on every continent and comes in just about every colour. 

Back in the 1500's somewhere in what is now Brazil a conquistador discovered a brilliant green stone and just assumed it was an emerald. Gemmology was a much easier science back in those days, green stone equals emerald, red stone equals ruby, blue stone equals sapphire. Actually what he'd found was a tourmaline and his confusion would live on for 300 years until tourmaline was finally identified as a separate mineral species sometime in the nineteenth century. Who knows how many of the emeralds that were sent to Spain from the new world were not actually tourmalines.

Brazil is also home to the flourescent blue green paraiba tourmaline, none of which is pictured above as its way out of my stone budget. Discovered in the 1980s, paraiba tourmaline is highly prized for its amazing electric blue green colour, the rarity factor further pushes the price up and it is routinely the most highly priced tourmaline on the market. 

One of the other highly sought after tourmaline colours is the pink red called rubellite. Amusing story surrounding a pink tourmaline - about the size of a walnut and called caesar's ruby because it's thought to have belonged to Augustus, it was given to Catherine the Great by Gustavus III of Sweden. How the Swedish came to have it from the Romans is a mystery. It was supposed to encourage Catherine to let him marry one of her granddaughters. Well she kept the stone and kept the granddaughter as well, but Gustavus had the last laugh when many many years later after the Russian revolution someone took a closer look at the stone and discovered that its actually just a tourmaline. Its kept in a museum underneath the Kremlin armoury along with the rest of the jewels of the State Diamond Fund that escaped being sold off after the revolution. You can go take a look at it next time you're in Moscow.

old school malaria prevention

Let's discuss the gin and tonic. Back in the days of the British in India, and other tropical parts of the globe, tonic water was taken as a malaria preventative as it contained large amounts of quinine which was known to prevent and treat malaria. Quinine tastes pretty foul though so some resourceful Brit had the idea to mix the tonic with gin and lime to make it more palatable and so was born the gin and tonic. Purely for medicinal purposes of course.

There are many different versions of a gin and tonic, the classic one is with lime but my personal favourite is hendricks gin with orange peel. It's also pretty good with cucumber. Tropical sunset optional.

pieces of eight

I was melting down some gold scrap the other day and wound up with a neat little pile of flattened nuggets which brought to mind lost pirate treasure. I like to 'research' on google as a handy work avoidance technique and came across some pretty fascinating trivia, for example did you know that the word for the currency 'peso' comes from 'pieces of eight' or in Spanish 'peso de ocho'? Yep, those are the pieces of eight of pirate lore. They were the most widely used coin in circulation internationally from the late 16th to late 19th centuries. One piece of eight was equivalent to eight 'reales', which was the unit of currency used in Spain at the time, and so the coins were often cut into eight pieces. The full coin is called a piece of eight and the eight small pieces are called bits. Confusing much? Sixteen full pieces of eight were equivalent to one gold doubloon. Millions of coins were minted over the course of three centuries and a lot of that minting happened in the new world since thats where the Spanish empire quite literally struck gold with vast deposits of gold and silver. All that treasure needed to be transported back to Spain and so naturally those ships became a get rich quick target for pirates. In response to this Spain started sending their ships in convoy which they deemed safer, unfortunately there was a downside to this and in 1715 the entire treasure fleet was sunk in a hurricane off florida after they made a spectacularly bad decision to wait until the onset of hurricane season as a further deterrent to pirates. It deterred the pirates alright. Some of that treasure is still out there waiting to be found….