Just two places remain on the fabulous new Enamelling on Fine Silver weekend - you will learn simple ways to make beautiful pure silver, textured pendant and earring 'blanks' on day one, and will then enamel them in vivid, contemporary colours on day two, with the help of established professional enamelling jeweller, Amanda Zoe.

New courses for October include a one-day Fingerprint Jewellery workshop, teaching you the tips and tricks for creating beautiful fingerprint and personalised jewellery for profit, and covering marketing/business pointers, realistic pricing, and reliable suppliers.

And most excitingly, you can learn to add real 24 carat gold to your jewellery pieces, on our new Adding gold with Keum Boo one-day workshop towards the end of October!

More information on all these courses is listed under the Courses & workshops menu. See you soon!

We're proud to announce that this year we'll be supporting Chestnut Tree House, Sussex's only hospice for children at their fabulous Snomwan's Ball.  More info and links in the Charitable giving section.

Lost wax carving for casting is a brilliant way of making chunkier silver jewellery like rings, and is fabulously relaxing.  If you choose to have a mould made by your casting company, you can easily make runs of jewellery (copies) without lots of extra effort, making the chance to learn this method unmissable if you plan to sell your work.  Dates just released for the two-part Lost wax method course are Sunday 6 June 2010 (part 1) and Sunday 18 July 2010 (part 2), from 10am-4pm each day, and bookings are open now.

Kids grow up so fast, so it's no wonder that so many mums and dads (not to mention grannies and grandads) love solid silver fingerprint jewellery.  It's so sweet to see (and feel) your actual child's fingerprint as part of a beautiful and stylish piece of handmade jewellery, but making fingerprint jewellery well isn't as easy as it seems.  Now the Sussex Jewellery School and Dabs & Doodles custom imprint jewellery have teamed up to launch a two-part certificated fingerprint, footprint, handprint and children's artwork jewellery training course.  Running over two consecutive days during June 2010, this intensive course teaches all you need to know to set up and run your own successful fingerprint and custom imprint jewellery business from home.

Don't know about bells on her toes (though PMC artist Lisa Cain's recent BronzClay bell with bird's foot handle springs to mind), but rings will definitely be on fingers after the Silver Rings Intensive course coming up on Saturday 27 March 2010.  We'll be focussing on a range of stunning silver rings, and students will be able to make their choice of at least two solid silver rings - possible designs include narrow band charm rings, wide-band textured and patterned rings, hammered rings, and rings with slogans or other words on.  This is a level 2 course, suitable for students with some experience of working with PMC3 silver clay, and experience of basic silverwork.  If you've completed the one-day Beginnings in Silver Clay workshop with us, you already have all the experience you need, but if not, give us a call to discuss your skills level and needs.  So if you've always wanted to make yourself a silver ring, now's your chance (please bear in mind that stone-setting isn't covered on the Silver Rings Intensive day, though we do run a separate level 2 stone-setting workshop).

The excellent team at Making Jewellery magazine tells us they'll be featuring the Sussex Jewellery School later on this year, highlighting our emphasis on blending traditional and modern silverwork techniques, and flagging up our resin and enamelling workshops. 

Sarah Jane has also been asked to contribute to the magazine's Ask the Expert column, giving top tips for creating a jewellery design sketchbook, even if you (think you) can't draw.

If you've ever wanted to bond with your Mum, or give her a real treat, I recommend making silver jewellery with her.  Like many women, my mum thinks she doesn't have a creative bone in her body, so I enjoyed encouraging her to get creative when we made some jewellery together.  The last mother and daughter team who booked onto our one-day Beginnings in Silver Clay workshop had huge fun together - and I think they even gave each other some of the jewellery they made on the day!

So I'm really looking forward to next Sunday's Mother's day course - I hope there are some mums and daughters amongst the students!

The resin jewellery courses in May are starting to fill up, and no wonder - professional jeweller Jo Mason will be visiting the Sussex Jewellery School over the weekend of 29 & 30 May 2010 to teach us all about casting with resin, and embedding gorgeous lovelinesses in resin bezels.  A not-to-be missed weekend for the budding jeweller!

It looks as though we've found the right guest tutor to teach our new Enamelling on Silver, Amanda Zoe of the Sussex Guild.  Amanda creates stunning enamelled silver jewellery, and we're thrilled that she's considering putting together a course just for Sussex Jewellery School students.

We might even be able to combine the enamelling day with a metal clay day, so students would be able to design and make their own fine silver bezels on one day, then return on another day to enamel them under Amanda's expert guidance!

It might not be cutting edge design, but jewellery with a heart motif is perennially popular, especially around Valentine's day, so I've been working on a new PMC (silver clay) pendant design.  The new design is called 'Sealed with a loving kiss', and I'm pleased with how it's going so far.  The pendant's based around two hearts - one has a really unusual texture - kind of matte and frosted, and the other is a mirror finish which I plan to drill and 'embroider' with silver, red gold or yellow gold wire.  The pendant'll be finished with either a rose quartz or garnet stone - or maybe I'll go crazy and add both!

I love that magic moment when students on the Beginnings in Silver Clay course start brushing their fired silver jewelley with a brass brush, revealing the shiny silver finish!  They're always so amazed that pieces that start out as wet clay then become solid (and hallmarkable) silver jewellery.

The beginners' level 1 course went really well today, and the students learnt, and worked, fast, meaning they all managed to make extra pieces of jewellery, and we even had time for a chat over lunch - not always possible on the intensive-paced beginners' course.

We even managed to cover a few extra techniques, which was great - maybe I shoot myself in the foot by sharing top tips freely, but my view is that I'm here to teach, to share my knowledge, and to inspire and encourage the students, and it's great that they leave with a passion for PMC and an excitement about the jewellery they're going to create at home with the PMC Starter kits they buy at the end of the course.

Teaching jewellery-making with PMC is a brilliant job!

Excitingly, the move of premises is on, and we will be in our new home in time for the Beginnings in Silver Clay (level 1) workshop on 18 December 2009.

While I'll miss the stunning scenery around the old workshop, being in Eastbourne town centre, and so near to the train station (we're a hop, skip and jump away from the station car park exit) will be much easier for students without cars, and the new premises will be lovely!

Tucked away behind a row of terraced houses, the mews is an old cake decorating building, and houses a larger  design studio on the first floor, and we plan to have a kitchenette and student common room downstairs.  The mews is home to other arty businesses, including Eastbourne's premier art materials shop and recording studio, so we'll fit right in with the creative vibe of the neighbourhood.

There's a lot of work to do to get the place right, so we'll be rolling up our sleeves and getting cracking over the next week or two.  Now, where's that paint pot?...

Wow!  What a great day yesterday!  With a range of ages (I wouldn't be indiscreet enough to go into detail), and students ranging from the confident to the totally-unsure-about-the-whole-thing, getting the pacing right, and making sure that everyone had just the right input was an enjoyable challenge.


In a mixed class like this, it's always important that the more confident students are challenged and given plenty to get cracking with, while at the same time making sure that less confident students are given plenty of encouragement, instruction and support.


Students at the Sussex Jewellery School are given a feedback form to complete at the end of the course, so we can check that quality is being maintained:  I'm delighted to say that for every criterion (effective delivery of the workshop;  tutor's knowledge and skill;  usefulness of handouts;  tutor's ability to deliver a fun and informative workshop), every student gave a '1' grading (excellent, exceeded expectations), and one student even handwrote an extra grading in because 'excellent' wasn't good enough, adding a 'plus' to give me a 1+!  ;-)

You can see pictures of the workshop, the beautiful jewellery that the students created, and read their comments, on the Jewellery-making with us pages.