Designs - Valentines Day

You may remember my blog post Inspiration - Valentines Day from about a week ago. In it I looked at different sources of inspiration for designs for Valentines Day.

Now I'm going to show you some of the designs I came up with using that inspiration.

I started with some keywords the inspiration had thrown up and then tried some initial sketches based around them. As I can't directly represent many of the ideas I had to find abstract forms which conveyed their essence instead. It proved to be a lot more difficult than I had imagined and in the end I resorted to using hearts a lot more than I had intended to. Over time I kept adding to my page with new ideas which came into my head - not necessarily relating to the theme.

Once I had a few ideas I started making items

First was this one. I took the basic heart shape and distorted it slightly, adding some intricate silver wire wrapping and a very pale pink glass nugget. The result is far too fancy for my taste but I may experiment with a simpler version.

I did like the colours - the way the copper provided a pinky feel without using any sickly sweet or in-your-face pink - so I decided to use them in my next piece. This one works around the idea of binding 2 people together in love, simply represented with the 2 copper sections joined by the silver wire wrap.

I made a few other pieces which I didn't like very much and ended up with just one more acceptable item. This one uses hearts again - I had a stash of these cute little glass heart beads and decided now was definitely the time to use them! These earrings are my favourite of the 3 and also inspired a series of birthstone jewelry which I will show you soon.

I have ordered some rose quartz beads, as that is the stone most associated with love, and when they arrive I will play around with a few more designs. Hopefully I can come up with a few I really love! These 3 will be appearing in my Etsy Shop sometime today or tomorrow.