Making jewellery out of recycled pagan wine bottle beads

This is a bottle of one of my most favourite red wines of all time. As well as being really great to drink (particularly with lamb dishes), the story on the bottle is really compelling to me:

My family has been tending our vineyards overlooked by the Saracosa hill since the early 1940s and legend has it that the hill was a sacred pagan site, where people gathered to worship the sun and the moon. Much of those original vineyards remain, producing low yields of high quality, concentrated grapes from which we selected to make this wine. 

I love the idea that I'm drinking wine produced from an ancient pagan site where rituals (so long as no animal sacrifice was involved) and magic were performed. Wow!

Anyway, here are some photographs of the jewellery set I've made from the beads which will be for sale tomorrow in Cambridge on my stall at All Saints Art & Craft market.

Hope to see you there! Whatever you're doing this Saturday, have a lovely weekend!

Wedding jewellery

My heart confetti arrived through the post this morning and so I've been photographing the jewellery I made with the recycled Rosé bottle beads.

These have all been listed in my Etsy shop. The plan is to be back at my stall at Cambridge's Art & Craft market from next Saturday onwards (if the weather forecast is dodgy though, I probably won't be there until February) and so I'll have them with me there too.

I celebrated my first Etsy sale yesterday! I changed my shop over to dollars and also introduced free worldwide shipping, I'm not sure which of the two things tipped my luck but I'm glad whichever it was! A lovely jewellery designer in the USA purchased a set of etched Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry beads. We both think that these will look great with the seaglass that she mainly works with. This is a market I wouldn't have reached but for Etsy so I'm hap-hap-happy! I have missed the buzz of making sales on my stall and am also looking forward to being back out there amongst my customers.

New recycled beads (Rosé wine bottle)

This is a new colour for me for my upcycled/recycled range, this time I used a Rosé wine bottle which had clear glass to show the colour of the pinky wine inside. Unlike Bombay Sapphire where it's the bottle that is the lovely colour, in this instance, the glass is clear and remarkably "clean" for glass from melted bottles.

I think it looks lovely etched as it is here and I can envisage some beautiful bridal pieces using them - keep a look out for new jewellery soon!