March is National Craft month and the “Stitch Craft Create” blog has been celebrating with lots of great interviews, projects ideas and crafty tips.  Our own Rebeca Mojica is featured today along with her book CHAINED and a very special free giveaway project of the Japanese Cross Earrings from the book.  

In the post, Rebeca offers tips on using color in your chainmaille jewelry as well as tips for choosing the perfect clasps to finish your piece.  Great tips from a chainmaille expert to help take your jewelry to the next level!  Don’t miss it.

Go to the blog and read Rebeca’s post…

chained book · colorful chainmaille · findings · National Craft Month · Rebeca Mojica · tips

We recently added a bunch of new toggles (mostly sterling silver) to our findings page.  Knowing that sometimes it can be difficult to know what toggle will compliment your project, we have compiled some suggestions for each of these new beautiful finishing touches below. We hope you find these tips useful and encourage you to share how you use these new toggles by leaving a comment or posting a photo of your piece to our page on Facebook!

Sterling Silver Flower Toggle

This toggle is small enough to compliment thinner weaves and really compliments Japanese weaves as it mimics the visible full circles seen in the weave.  Rebeca recommends using it for with Japanese weaves that aren’t too wide such as our Japanese Flower Bracelet or the Mini Lace or 2-row Japanese Lace variations of our Japanese Lace project (supply lists for these variations are available on at the bottom of the project page.)

Golden Sun Toggle

This toggle makes a statement and might work best as a feature on an otherwise simple piece. The mixed finish compliments pieces that combine Sterling Silver and Gold-filled rings like the Helm Wave variation on pg 103 of CHAINED.

Sterling Sliver Woven Hexagon Toggle

This toggle is very subtle and especially complimentary to any piece that has angled edges such as Zig Zag Lancelot. Rebeca also suggests using it to finish möbiused pieces such as Möbiused Rosettes since the toggle looks like two intertwined shapes.

Nordic Sterling Silver Toggle

This toggle is substantial and needs a hefty weave to hang on to it. Try using it with a cuff like Dragonscale or possibly an elf sheet.

Sterling Silver Scallop Toggle

This toggle is large but quite light and compliments many weaves. Because of its size and weight, it works well to finish necklaces in a fancy way without putting too much weight on the neck or spinning the piece around.

Sunflower Sterling Silver Toggle

This is another great toggle for finishing pieces that have angled edges. Rebeca recommends using it to finish Zig Zag Byzantine, Zig Zag Lancelot or a Staggered Japanese Lace piece.

Bronze Squiggle Toggle

This toggle is a lovely way to finish any piece made with bronze rings, especially spiral pieces or pieces between about 1/2″ and 1″ wide (1.25 cm – 2.5 cm). Try it with Helm Wave, Euro 4-in-1 or Double Spiral.

Sunburst Sterling Silver Toggle

This toggle looks great with many weaves but is especially complimentary to coiled projects since its grooves mimic the coils. We really love it with our Coiled Bracelet and Coiled Crystals projects.

finishing a piece · inspiration · precious metal · sterling silver · sterling silver findings · toggles

Some of our most popular jewelry kits (and favorite modern chainmaille projects!) use components such as seed beads, crystals, and glass rings.  The question has come up from a several of our customers, “How do I clean pieces that use delicate components?”  We think this is an excellent question – one everyone might benefit from hearing our answer to.  I posed this question to two of our designers who use these components in their B3 designs as well as their own lines of jewelry.  The following is their expert advice.

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Advice from Kat Wisniewski, designer behind several of our kits including Glass Caterpillar and artists behind Elemental Art Jewelry.

What are the concerns with taking care of pieces that use glass and crystal rings?  Glass is super easy to take care of and can be tumbled over and over again in a small barrel jewelry tumbler.  Crystals that do not have foil backs can be tumbled as well.  If it has a foil back, it will scratch and deteriorate over time, kinda fading in various spots. Lemon juice cleaning may be OK for foil back crystals, but I’ve never tried it.  Lemon juice works great with glass and non-foiled crystals!

What do you recommend when it comes to cleaning these pieces?  I recommend tumbling with burnishing compound and shot over every other possible method.  15-20 min is fine, rinse, dry with blow dryer on cool setting.

What do you recommend to keep these pieces clean to begin with?  Air tight zip locks with Anti- tarnish tabs for each individual item–yes I actually suck the air out!  Then I put items in a larger freezer zip lock and suck all the air out.  Then I put all the items in a box and keep in a cool and dry place.

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Rebeca has started using more crystals in her designs for B3 like Coiled Crystals, Beaded Zig-Zag Byzantine, and Crystal Ring Byzantine.  She adds this bit of advice:

We’ve tumbled plenty of pieces with crystals, and they have been just fine.  However, it would still be possible for a crystal to get hit with a piece of shot in JUST the right spot at just the right (er, wrong) moment, and shatter.   It’s never happened to us, so that should be reassuring to everyone, but still, it is possible.  I recommend not letting the piece get too tarnished to begin with so that the time spent in the tumbler is minimized.  Do maintenance with soap and water as often as possible.

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We hope this is helpful to those of you wondering how to take care of these pieces.  Our FAQ has even more information about taking care of jewelry in general.  If you have created jewelry with these components and have additional advice on their care and cleaning, share your thoughts in the comments section below!

beads · care and cleaning · crystals · glass rings

Any chainmailler can tell you that finding a great storage solution for all your jump rings is a necessity, but keeping all those sizes, colors, and metals organized is no easy feat (not to mention avoiding that dreaded sound of rings hitting the floor or the discovery of the backpack or purse jump ring explosion!) 

We decided to ask our community on Facebook what solutions they have come up with for storing their jump rings and they did not disappoint! Here is a roundup of some of their creative (and somewhat unexpected) suggestions as well as links for where to find them.

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Craft Mates Bead Caddies

We here at Blue Buddha use these almost exclusively for storing small amounts of jump rings set aside and organized for our interns, teachers, and Rebeca herself.  Because they are made for crafters, they do an excellent job of staying closed and keeping things separate – two incredibly important features for chainmaillers.  We especially like their locking feature and the fact that you can open each compartment one at a time (allowing you to dump out just one size at at time.)  There is no need to keep things in baggies in these containers.  We write directly on ours with Sharpie but a label-maker would do the trick to help you remember what is in each compartment (or take a suggestion for one of our fans on Facebook and try re-purposing the labels that come on our baggies by peeling and resticking.)

For a listing of where to find Craft Mates Bead Caddies, visit their website.

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Hardware Organizers: Drawers

There are a variety of small drawer organizers that are normally used for organizing hardware (such as nuts, bolts, and screws.)  These are not so portable, but offer a lot of storage for home.  If you use something like these drawers (something similar to what we use in the studio for storing ring packs ready to be put into orders) you will probably want to keep your rings in baggies to avoid spillage.

These can be found at a number of places for under $20, here is one we found available on the Sears website.
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Hardware Organizers: Containers

Similar to the Craft Mates caddies, these can be used to store your jump rings for toting around.  Unlike Craft Mates, many of these do not allow you to open up one section at a time, so again you may want to keep your rings in baggies to avoid mixing/spilling when you open the lid.

Also available at any number of stores for $10-$20, here is an one we found on the Sears website as well.
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Tackle Boxes

Several folks in our community on Facebook recommended looking in the fishing department of your local sports store.  Tackle boxes come in lots of different sizes, with varying compartment sizes and many let you move the compartment separators around to customize your storage.

Here is one made by Plano (another recommendation from folks on Facebook) available from Bass Pro Shops.

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Dot Box Storage System

These come strongly recommended by one of our community members on Facebook.  Lot’s of small containers that close tightly and can be removed and opened individually.  The system offers a variety of container sizes allowing for lots of customization within one case.

Dot Boxes are available from several different sources.  Visit this site see a video to that shows all the smaller containers contained in the larger carrying case. 

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Pill Organizer

This was another suggestion we received when we posed this question to our community on Facebook.  Try using a pill organizer for a current project.  It’s probably too small to store ALL your jump rings, but can keep just enough to tote around with you for working on a certain project on-the-go.

Pill organizers like this one available on the Walgreens website can be found at any local drugstore.

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Even more ideas…

- Empty pill bottles
- Condiment cups with snap on lids
- Spice jars with magnets that stick to a strip on the wall (turn the lid and shake some out – minimizes spillage)
- Plastic containers used for embroidery floss

Have a solution not mentioned here?  Share it with us in the comments below!  Thanks to everyone on Facebook that responded to our question.  You all are a never-ending source for ideas and inspiration and we love it!

jump rings · storage ideas

The question of which findings work best to close colorful anodized aluminum projects has been popping up a lot for us lately – on our page on Facebook, through customer emails, etc.  Seeing the frequency of this questions, it seems like a blog post about this subject is in order – so here it is!

NOTE: Some of the examples below use our other colored rings (anodized niobium and enameled copper) – however, they should still help to give you an idea of how the clasps look with color.

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Figuring out which finding to use to finish a piece can be tricky.  Do you want the clasp to be a feature?  Do you want it to blend in seamlessly?  Will what I see on the website actually match my final project?  These are all questions that add to that trickiness.

If your project combines anodized aluminum with plain base metal rings, matching the clasp to the base metal rings is an easy way to make it feel part of the piece.  We offer base metal findings in finishes to match our aluminum, copper, and jewelry brass jump rings.

You can also match our base metal findings to full-color projects.  If your project uses warm colors, consider using copper or gold finish.  Cool colors work best with rhodium finish.

If your project uses our darker colors (black, purple, iridescent gunmetal, etc.) you might want to try a base metal clasp in a gunmetal finish.  We’ve finished many darker projects with gunmetal clasps and they look beautiful.

If your project is brightly colored and you’d like to finish it with color as well, you might want to consider using our anodized niobium or enameled copper toggles.  Our anodized niobium toggles are handmade especially for us and can be anodized to 30 different colors.  We also offer anodized niobium earwire to finish colorful earring projects!

Our enameled copper toggles are fun and funky and come in 10 bright colors.  For a bold statement, finish a project with the large red circle toggle!

You might be wondering why we don’t offer anodized aluminum findings to match our AA jump rings.  We posted some information about this on our wall on Facebook just this week:

We would love to eventually carry matching AA clasps…in fact it’s something we’ve had on our minds for a while. We have done some preliminary thinking and talking about it with one of our manufacturers (we’ll only do it if we can make them U.S.A.-made like our AA rings) but we haven’t made any official moves to make them….yet.

We’ll keep everyone posted once we get to the point of being able to make them!

So that’s the skinny on choosing the ring finding for your anodized aluminum project.  It’s not an exact science so the decision might still be a tricky one but we hope that gives you a little more direction.  Have some great suggestions of your own on how to finished a colored pieces?  Share them with us on our wall on Facebook!

anodize aluminum · clasps · colored findings · colored rings · findings · finishing a piece