Grand Opening - Eronel Designs

Back in the dark ages, when I was a teenager, I used to make jewelry. In the past few years, I've still made jewelry, but I used to sell it, along with my paintings, at Womancraft, an artists' cooperative in Chapel Hill, and at Horizon Gallery, which used to be in Brightleaf Square, in Durham. Working at Womancraft was great, because every weekend, I got to spend 4 hours meeting new people that came in the store, catching up with the regulars and talking to my fellow artists and artisans. As you can guess, many of our conversations went something like this:

"After I leave here, I'm going to the Persian Carpet."
"Is that a restaurant?"
"No, it's a rug store."

I don't think I need to provide attribution for the individual quotes, unless this is the first post of mine that you've discovered. I'm afraid that I didn't have to make up that example either.

In any case, once I started college, particularly when I was a sophomore, my classes interfered with how I had chosen to spend my spare time for the previous four years. I had to quit. I not only quit working at Womancraft, but I pretty much quit making jewelry and I quit painting. I concentrated even more heavily on my studies and then leapt right into my career, which did not involve my artistic abilities.

Recently, I've started making jewelry again with wild abandon. I still have all of my supplies from the old days, my sterling silver and gold-filled wire, my semiprecious gemstone beads and my tools. Now I have an art studio, so I can spread out all of my work without having to put it all away before preparing for exams or writing a paper.

I decided to set up an Etsy store to sell my work. For those of you who haven't checked out Etsy, it's a way for artists to sell their handmade crafts on-line, within a nice framework. When I was younger, I sold my jewelry and my paintings under "Lenore's Creations", but I decided to be a little backward and my wares are now called "Eronel Designs". Like most things, I have no idea how successful my new business venture will be, but if I come anywhere close to selling as many earrings and necklaces as I did long ago, my fingers will be pretty busy on the weekends.


In reality, I only did this so I would have an excuse to create a third Twitter account, @eroneldesigns, to communicate information about the store and spout random bits of enthusiasm.

Behind the Necklace

Thursday night, I made this necklace and I'm very happy with how it turned out. It looks even better while it's being worn by its new owner.

This made me realize that I need to get some fabric to use for the background of such photos. In this case I used a skirt that I didn't iron or put much effort into flattening. Fortunately, it will be very easy to find something suitable at my parents', since there is an excess of fabric there. I really like the neutral titanium background provided by a Macbook pro, but there's this annoying abstract fruit logo that detracts from it.

Back when I was selling my jewelry and when I created the images on my website, I had to either take photographs and scan them in or put the jewelry in the scanner itself. Everything is so much easier now that I can use my digital camera.

Making Jewelry and Trying New Tools

One of the mistakes I made when I was having my house built was not putting sufficient lighting in my art studio. This weekend, my dad installed a giant fluorescent fixture with "sunshine" bulbs, which is fantastic and extraordinarily bright. From the living room, it reminds me of the trunk of the car in Repoman. He also switched the table I make jewelry on with the one on which I was organizing photos, which is lower. A few weeks ago, I ordered some more tools for making jewelry, including a steel block, a few hammers and some jigs for bending wire.

Tonight I decided I had to try all these things out. I find making jewelry very satisfying, especially when I'm trying out new techniques. These aren't perfect, by any means, but I hadn't done any hammering in approximately fourteen years, since I took a metal smithing class at the now defunct Duke Crafts Center, so I'm pleased. When I had my jewelry making business, I didn't do any hammering at all and it's certainly nice to be able to work harden the sterling silver. I'm looking forward to making a lot more.