Jewelry Lovers

Papier-mâché literally means chewed paper. It’s a crafting technique that requires you to take a basic form (like a foil ball, a balloon, chicken wire form or just about anything else) and cover it with a mixture of paste and sculpting medium, usually newspaper. Papier-mâché is great for making lightweight sculptures and other items like [...]

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Like any papier-mâché project, you must create a form for your beads and pendants. Aluminum foil is an excellent choice for bead forms. It’s lightweight and easy for kids to work with.
Here’s how you create a basic foil form:
1. Take pieces of foil and wad them up. Start with roughly a 4-inch by 6-inch square [...]

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Although many beads are worked on string a surprising amount of bead jewelry is made using metal pins or wire, and once the basic principles of wire jewelry are understood, necklaces, bracelets, earrings and brooches of apparently complicated natures become as easy to work as the simplest design. Furthermore, old jewelry can be re-styled or [...]

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Casting
There are various techniques for transforming metals into shapes. Casting is one such technique and involves pouring molten metal into a mould or crucible where it is left to harden. This technique was first mastered in Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, when moulds were chiselled from stone or baked clay and filled with molten [...]

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Although many of the materials used for contemporary jewellery-making are new and revolutionary, the art of metalwork often follows the basic rules set out by early craftsmen thousands of years ago. Apart from the advent of electroplating in the 19th century and the more efficient techniques allowed by today’s machines, many of the basic metalworking [...]

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Silver has almost as distinguished a history as gold. It was highly regarded in Ancient Egypt. In Ancient Greece it wasthe silver mines at Laurium that made Athens rich and paid for the Athenians’ long and eventually successful campaign against the Persians. To the Spanish conquistadores in South and Central America in the sixteenth century [...]

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