I have been stitching, but it’s under wraps for the moment, so I thought I would share what has finally happened to some of the job lot of odd chess pieces I bought at the beginning of the year.
I learned a number of important lessons in a short space of time.
I’ve learned that box wood is incredibly hard, cheap modern metal eyelets are soft and that if you drill the hole properly in the first place instead of drilling the start of it and hoping that the eyelet screw thread will just do the rest for you, it saves hours of work trying to drill out the broken eyelet stumps and then eventually giving up in a temper and and throwing the whole ruined piece (the unusual white pawn with the disc-like layers in the centre of the picture above) in the bin along with three broken eyelets and a broken drill bit.
The partial modern set you can see towards the back of the first photo was more user friendly. It’s made from a much less dense wood and I polished and drilled several of the pawns to turn them into earrings. I made some simple ones with just the pawns:
And then some longer ones with added beads.
This pair, with vintage Japanese lustreware beads, is available here in my Etsy Shop.
And I finished off my morning’s work by turning a vintage black knight (with a softwood head which made adding the hanging loop easy) and a boxwood base into a necklace by adding some sections of chain and a couple of vintage beads.
I’ve recently started stocking my work at a lovely local community café where people often go to play chess, so it was the perfect place to put the chess piece jewellery. I hope they find some takers.
Under A Topaz Sky 