Enchanted Adornments: Creating Mixed-Media Jewelry with Metal Clay, Wire, Resin, and More by Cynthia Thornton ($24.95 Interweave) is a mixture of jewelry techniques as well as art-journal. The author combines story telling, her original artwork, and step-by-step how-to information to inspire and teach.
Design Strategies and Tools
One of the first sections in the book discusses how to gather inspiration and turn it into jewelry design ideas. A sketchbook, drawing, look books, and an inspiration board are some of the suggestions provided in the text for collecting ideas. Deconstruction, where you analyze a concept in bits and piece, is another interesting strategy used by the author to offer a place to begin exploring design concepts. These are all very useful and do-able concepts even for beginning designers.
This is referred to "The Essentials" section and covers 32 pages worth of tool and techniques information organized by wire, polymer clay, metal clay, and resin. The clay section is the largest of all of these and there are also a few metal clay component type projects such as a toggle clasp, chain, button, and bezel. Other related techniques include patinas, texturing, and making molds. These are set up so that readers can refer back to the section for various projects included in the projects section.
The Story and Projects
There are twenty projects in addition to an assortment of variations, and this is where this text takes a very different journey than most how-to jewelry books. Thornton has created more than jewelry pieces to describe. She incorporates each design into an overall narrative adventure that begins with her protagonist's visit to a mysterious woman who commissions her to make a unique piece of jewelry for 19 of her female friends. The jewelry artist journals her experience with each client and develops a design concept based on her meetings with each woman. This connects back to the inspiration section of the text which earlier discusses similar design technique. Thus it provides a way to demonstrate how these design strategies can work in an actual situation, even though this is obviously fictionalized.
The Projects and Media
While for the most part, the projects are truly mixed-media, sometimes even mixing polymer clay, metal clay, resin, and wire in a jewelry piece, it is a little heavier on the clay side compared to resin and wire. This is not really that surprising since clay is touted as two of the primary media used. I thought it was worth mentioning, however, since not all metal clay people are interested in polymer clay and visa versa.
The general style of the jewelry projects is whimsical and ornate, and yes, at times "enchanted" as the title suggests. For example, in one necklace project (Woodland Wings Necklace) she uses wire and resin to make wings that really look like a fairy should be wearing them. In another project, Owl Ojime Necklace, she creates a faux ivory owl pendant using polymer clay and constructs an eclectic wire and bead chain for it as well.
Concluding Thoughts
Needless to say, there is a lot going on in the book, and I mean that in a good way. There are many layers to the projects which combine lots of different materials as well as methods. Novice jewelry makers or those interested in quickie instant gratification jewelry projects may be overwhelmed by this. However, those jewelry designer who have been looking for concrete ideas to expand on techniques or strategies for approaching jewelry designing in general will find a great deal of inspiration as well as practical how-to in this text.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
