During the week I've been practicing making texture in leaves and poppy petals for my ongoing poppy project. After a quick demonstration and a few minutes practice on a scrap piece of silver, I used a Scorper to make regular lines growing out from the petal centres to mimic the markings and textures in a real poppy.

After using a tonne of cotton wool and trusty masking tape to wrap around my hands whilst engraving, this fun process has encouraged me to look forward to continuing with my poppies and even think about other flower projects I'd like to hand craft afterwards.

It also couldn’t be a week at the workbench in Whitstable without choosing a few Sea Glass pieces and beginning to set them. I tried to select different colours this time and took the opportunity to build our stock with a variety of new jewellery pieces to open with when we can. ​

We've started 2021 off in the right way, with a bit of fun and playing around with ideas for Whitstable Sea Glass Earrings after a lovely customer requested some. ​Obviously we couldn't leave Digby out of the fun!

It started with the traditional idea of claw setting, but with naturally irregular shaped sea glass it can be a challenge in all directions; deciding where to make the claws sit and balancing the sea glass in the setting for it to look flat on the surface.