First time being nominated…

I thought I would write my first blog post today with a bit of exciting news. I am so thrilled to be nominated for the Best Indie Jewellery Business Awards held by the Indie Business Awards on Instagram. This is the first time I have been nominated. I am not sure what the judges are looking for but I do know there are 90 fabulous jewellery makers that have been nominated. I am not expecting to get any further in the competition but just to be nominated was such a joy. I would like to thank Rachael from The Paint Box in Cleethorpes who was my main sponsor for the nomination.

I did actually win a competition in an American Jewellery magazine a couple of years ago. I entered a beaded necklace that I designed and made for a lady with a stoma. My design won and I received a beautiful jewellery book as my prize and a feature in their magazine.

When you enter or are entered into things like this, it does make you realise that there is so much competition out there and how hard it is to make yourself stand out. I have been concentrating my efforts in to teaching silversmithing for many years now but lockdown has given me the opportunity to be a little bit more creative, given me some time to design, play and come up with quite a few new unique jewellery pieces.

The people over at the Indie Awards picked the above picture from all those on my Instagram page. These earrings were not the best piece of jewellery on my page, they were a pair of earrings I designed and made just the day before the competition so I would have like to have had a few more goes at tweaking this design to get it neater. I like the design very much, I am calling it rockpool. The silver balls and the blue stone are supposed to represent the rock pool and the shells that the circle hang from are cast from a Cleethorpes cockle shell. I just like to practise and perfect my designs so this was my prototype pair. The next pair I make will be neater and I want to leave myself space to get to set the stones set a lot better on the next pair. However, the people at the Indi Awards were not to know that and I am thrilled they thought the earrings were nice enough to show.

I think I will look at putting myself forward for things like this a little more in the future, being a nominee was not as scary as I thought. After all, it is just a bit of fun and helps to get your name mentioned in the jewellery field and let’s face it, it is a very competitive sector.

Thanks for reading my first blog post, I hope you enjoyed it. I going to try and make this will be a regular feature - Julie xx