Designing Handmade Jewelry

By Helen Fisher

Making handmade jewellery can be an extremely rewarding venture whether your aim is to impress family and friends or even to turn your hobby in to a small business. The small pieces involved and fiddly techniques can however be incredibly challenging and often the most demanding aspect of handmade jewellery is the design process. It is all well and good if you have the patience to sit for hours with a steady hand and construct a piece for yourself but if the finished item turns out to look as ugly as a dog�s back side then the whole process would have been a complete waste of time. The key to avoiding such situations is to plan carefully for the design of the jewellery that you wish to make. Designing a product of any kind requires several areas of basic thought and these will include aesthetics, function and material and so I shall discuss each of these areas in further detail.

Aesthetics- What will the piece look like? This may sound like an obvious consideration because it is the most important area of jewellery design. People wear jewellery to make themselves look attractive and so it goes without saying that the jewellery needs to look appealing. When you design a piece you need to think further than this and consider carefully who is going to wear the jewellery because this will help you to arrive at some decisions about style. For example if you are designing a piece to be worn on a summer holiday you might go for a design that is fun and bold because this will represent the mood that you would hope to be in. For wedding jewellery your design would likely be more pretty and romantic. So when you start to design your jewellery you should consider what look or style you are aiming for.

Function- The function of all jewellery is usually the same- to accessorise or enhance the outfit that a person is wearing and this is why aesthetics is so important. The particular function of a piece of jewellery can also give us some guide lines for our design and this will mainly be sizes. For example if you are designing a necklace you will need to work out a minimum length that will suit most necks and then decide whereabouts on the neckline the piece will sit. Will it be adjustable to fit the maximum amount of people? You should also consider the type of clothing that will be worn with it.

Material- Material is an extremely important part of design and you need to get it right. With jewellery there is a huge choice of materials that can be used and adapted and this is almost limited only by your imagination. You do need to make sure however that your design will be appropriate for the material and technique that you wish to use. Some materials such as glass and metals can require specialist skills and equipment to work with and so you need to bear in mind the available materials and skills while you design your jewellery.