And The Winner Is…..

#188: Anna Olson!

Anna lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the United States. She has chosen the Vintage Peacock Necklace as her prize, saying, “I really like peacocks, they are so beautiful! I am really drawn to deep colors like that, that flow together nicely. Also, I think it’s a neat design that I would wear a lot!”

The Vintage Peacock Necklace will be making its way across the pond to Sioux Falls on Monday.

I would like to thank everyone who participated, making this giveaway such a success. When I first thought about giving a piece away, I wasn’t really sure how it would actually work, but I’m so pleased with the way it has turned out.

Congratulations to Anna, and again, my thanks to everyone who participated and made this giveaway work so well: you’re the best!

Keep a look out for another giveaway: I’m sure it won’t be too horribly long coming. In the meantime, I’m working on a new collection of pieces that I’ll be launching soon, so I’ll post about that next.

Happy Friday!

[Now Closed] First Jewellery Giveaway!

Rose Garden Earrings

Strawberry Kiss Necklace

Vintage Peacock Necklace

William Morris Cufflinks

I’ve decided to do my first jewellery giveaway- I’m really excited about it! There are several ways you can enter, and you can potentially get quite a lot of entries. The winner will get to choose which of the four pieces pictured above they want to claim as their prize.

How to enter:

1 Entry: Become a fan of Miriam Rowe Jewellery on Facebook (Leave a comment on the page to claim your entry: if you are already a Facebook Fan, just post on the page’s wall to claim your entry)

1 Entry for each friend you invite who becomes a fan of Miriam Rowe Jewellery on Facebook (To claim your entries leave a wall post on the page with the names of your friends who join)

3 Entries: Blog about this contest and link back to this post (To claim your 3 entries comment on this post with a link to your blog post)

5 Entries: Complete a 5 minute survey about Miriam Rowe’s website (Filling in your details at the end of the survey will register your 5 entries)

Details

Contest runs from today, February 22nd, through March 2nd. Last chance to enter is March 2nd at 11:59pm GMT (6:59pm EST). Entries will be assigned a number as they are received, and the winning entry will be chosen using Random.org . The winner will be announced on Friday March 4th. Must be 18 or older to enter.

Feel free to share this contest on Facebook and Twitter: Good luck!

:Update on 23rd Feb: 24 hours into the competition and there are already 60 entries: exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has already participated, and thanks to all of you who will take part before the deadline!

:Update (28th Feb): With a few days left in the contest, we are up to 127 contest entries, and so far the two people with the highest number of entries are Leigh Ann (13) and Alexandra (10)- thanks to everyone for your help, you still have a few days to get your entries in!

Exciting News!

I’ve decided to do my first jewellery giveaway: I’m really excited about it! I’ll be posting details next week about how to enter. In the meantime, take a look at my Etsy site and leave a comment about which piece you would like to see as the prize in this jewellery giveaway- details coming early next week!

Exhibiting at SNAG [Press Release]

Victoria Ceiling Brooch

 

American designer and recent graduate of Birmingham’s School of Jewellery in the United Kingdom, Miriam Rowe has been chosen to participate in the Art Jewelry Forum’s “Geography” Exhibition at the Society of North American Goldsmiths (SNAG) Conference in Seattle, Washington at the end of May this year.

“Taking geography as its theme, this exhibition, curated by Susan Cummins and Mike Holmes and organized by the Art Jewelry Forum, demonstrates the global nature of the contemporary jewelry field and the diverse ways that jewelers react to their environment. The exhibition is a celebration of the amazing variety of the natural world and humanity’s part in it, and a demonstration of the unusual ability that jewelry has to identify culture and place in a rapidly changing and increasingly interconnected world. This is Geography.” *1

Miriam’s Victoria Ceiling Brooch will be represented at the exhibition by Crafthaus, an online social network of professional craft artists based in the United States. Brigitte Martin, founder and editor of http://www.crafthaus.ning.com and a gallery member of the AJF chose Miriam’s work from the network’s over 2000 members: “Miriam’s pieces are directly related to the exhibition’s theme. When I was approached by the AJF to suggest artwork from my network’s members for this show, I immediately thought of her. Miriam’s work is both beautiful and well-made. Executed in an unusual material, her brooches are directly influenced by her surroundings and personal experiences found in her current environment. A perfect fit for ‘Geography.’”

The Victoria Ceiling Brooch (pictured) is inspired by the interior of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, one of the Miriam’s favourite places to spend the day. On being chosen to exhibit at SNAG, Miriam says, “I am so excited about being a part of the Geography exhibition. Cultural geography plays a huge role in my jewellery designs: the rich history of European art and design inspires me, and moving to Britain has allowed me to immerse myself in the art and objects of their culture.”

For more information please visit http://www.miriamrowe.com

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*1 “Geography: An Exhibition of Contemporary Jewelry Presented at the 2011 Seattle SNAG Conference Organized by Art Jewelry Forum.” Art Jewelry Forum | Home. Art Jewelry Forum. Web. 01 Feb. 2011.

Etsy Sale!

Hello, you’re hearing from me again, and I only just posted yesterday- crazy!

Just wanted to let the blog world know that I’m having a sale on my Etsy site: I’ve marked everything down by 20% and if you’re a fan of my Facebook Jewellery Page you get an additional 20% off (send me a message or leave a note on the page wall and I’ll send you the code)

Happy Valentine’s Day! The sale is on until February 8th: plenty of time to get a paycheck and get a gift for someone special (this is also a perfect excuse to buy something for yourself, as you’re someone special, obviously!)

We Are Birmingham Article

Over the Christmas holiday I was sitting in We Are Birmingham’s shop, enjoying a drink with a friend of mine who was over visiting from the States. Aaron, the managing director of We Are Birmingham, came over to tell me that the shop was going to have an article in the Birmingham Assay Office’s publication, and that they were going to use a photo of one of my pieces in the article. Excellent!
I kind of forgot about that exciting news with all the craziness associated with the holiday season, but when I was our Design Space studio last week I saw the Assay Office publication and remembered- sure enough, there was the article about We Are Birmingham, and there was a photo of my William Morris Necklace!

My 3 Week Career Change (or: Our Anglo-American Wedding)

Every year up til this one, Christmastime has been a chance for me to go back to Georgia and see the family- I’d spend the holiday eating lots of food, watching all of the Lord of the Rings extended edition dvds, reading, and catching up with all the people I hadn’t seen for a long time. This year was completely different.

This is the first year I haven’t been working on University projects, so I decided to embrace retail’s busiest time of year and participate in several jewellery shows (which I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts)- so up to December 12th I was frantically busy getting things ready to go in shops, gallery exhibitions, and Christmas fairs.

On December 13th the first wedding guest arrived.

I had done a little bit of prep work for our New Years Day wedding (1-1-11!), but I was so busy filling jewellery orders that by the time I finished my last show on December 12th I still had most of my wedding to sort out.

Over the next 3 weeks I worked as an event planner, jeweller (made the bridesmaids jewellery and designed my own wedding ring, of course!), graphic designer and printer (invitations, programmes, place cards), caterer (bought some pre-made food from Marks and Spencer but had to put it all together and make enough things for 200 wedding guests!), florist, tailor (needed to alter my wedding dress and one of the bridesmaid’s dresses), tour guide (for all the Americans who flew to the UK for the wedding!), makeup artist, and personal shopper. My fiance kept trying to get me to pay other people to do parts of the wedding (especially the cake- he thought it was crazy for me to make 250 cupcakes, and I thought it was crazy to pay someone else £800 ($1300) to make cake that wasn’t nearly as tasty as what I could make!)

I’m sure my “do it yourself” attitude toward life in general contributed greatly to my 3 week “career change”; I’ve never been someone who wanted to pay people to do something that I could do myself! In hindsight, it probably would have been good if I had subcontracted a few things out, but luckily I had a ton of amazing friends and relatives who pitched in and made everything happen just the way it needed to!

Here are a few photos of the activities leading up to the wedding:

Shopping for Wedding Food with Mom and Clare

Mom sorting out the flowers

Trying my hand at flower arranging

Back from our late-night holly gathering expedition

Andrew helped with the bridesmaid dress ironing

I baked 250 chocolate and vanilla cupcakes from scratch

Cupcake Decorating Team

 

The day of the wedding was so much fun. The crazy amount of work paid off and it was so rewarding to see everything come together and enjoy spending the day with so many friends and family members. Here are photos of how everything turned out!

Holy Trinity Church, Wordsley

Bridesmaids

Signing the Register

Mr. and Mrs.

Stefani and Abi (Both pendants were vintage brooches I bought here in England)

Juliane (Pendant is from a French nurse's uniform brooch in the early 1900's)

Group Photo in Church

Our rings (I designed mine based on a ring from the 1920's then had it drawn up in CAD and cast in palladium)

Newlyweds

Cupcake Table (Thanks to my sisters for the awesome bride and groom cake toppers!)

Cupcake Feeding Time!

Now it’s back to being a full-time jeweller. The stint as Event Planner, Florist, etc. was an enjoyable 3 week career change, but I’m looking forward to getting back to my real work. Happy 2011!

Catch-up

FLUX Exhibiton at the MAC in Birmingham

Has it really been almost a whole month since the last time I wrote? Yes, I guess it has. It’s the busiest time of year for most jewellers, and I’m no exception: the Christmas rush for me started in mid-October with getting pieces ready for We Are Birmingham and Brilliantly Birmingham’s FLUX Exhibition. As soon as I finished those, I had two more opportunities come up: Open Studios in the Jewellery Quarter and Angel Christmas Fair in Islington (part of London).

Open Studios and Angel Christmas Fair finish this weekend, while FLUX runs until 9 January and We Are Birmingham lasts a long time. At the beginning of December I started running a promotional offer: 20% off Etsy orders for people who were fans of my Facebook site, and an additional discount for personal friends. This has kicked off a string of Etsy orders to fill, which has been great! I’ll be spending the next four weeks away from the studio, as I’m getting married on 1 January and need to stop doing studio work and start doing some wedding work, so I’ve updated my Etsy so that the only pieces for sale are pieces I have already made. That means that if you want to order anything for the next month, you can still do so and I’ll be able to get it to you quickly and it won’t cut into my wedding prep- and if you’d like the Etsy discount code, contact me: miriamrowe@mac.com

As part of Brilliantly Birmingham, I had a really exciting opportunity come my way this week: a chance to do a live radio interview on BBC West Midlands! I was really nervous because I wasn’t sure what to expect: I hadn’t been given a list of questions and had never done any sort of radio interview before, so I was a bundle of nerves! I told myself that instead of thinking of it as a live radio interview that would make me look like an idiot if I messed things up, I would pretend that I was just having a conversation with someone I just met. That seemed to work well enough to keep me from messing up too much. If you’d like to hear the interview, it’s on iPlayer until 16 December: I’m on from 46:30 – 53:00.

This month I also had a chance to get involved in another side of Birmingham’s jewellery culture: I ended up in a modelling contest being run by the Jewellery Quarter marketing initiative and a local newspaper. I saw it advertised and thought it looked fun- the winner got to model jewellery and work with different Jewellery Quarter publications. I thought it would be a great way to get involved in the JQ community, so I went to a casting call. I ended up being made a finalist, and the 3 girl finalists and 3 boy finalists got to spend the day doing a photo shoot with formalwear and jewellery from the Quarter. It was such a fun day- taking a break from the studio to spend a day having people put makeup on me and play with my hair was a great change of pace! We spent the day at Harris and Gibbs, a fantastic salon in the JQ:

Harris and Gibbs Salon

We spent the morning having our hair teased, fluffed, and played with, then spent the afternoon getting makeup done, dresses and jewellery on, and being photographed. They took tons of photos, and this is the only one I’ve seen (I think I look really weird in it, but as Juliane pointed out, we always think we look weird from any angle other than head-on)

Slightly Embarrassing Model Photo

The winner was decided based solely on text votes, and although it was close, I didn’t win (I would imagine it’s because I had more important things to do with my time and money than sit around text-voting for myself all day)… I made some great contacts during the contest, though, and may follow up on those contacts and see about doing some modelling in the new year. We also did a video shoot, so you can see my little bit of the video here (you’re welcome to watch the whole thing, or you can skip to 2:00 to see my little section)

So just to recap: the reason I haven’t blogged in a month is because I’m planning a wedding, did 4 large jewellery shows in the space of a month, fulfilled lots of Christmas orders, went on BBC radio, and became a finalist in a modelling competition. Oh yeah, and helped my fiance move. TWICE. I’m probably missing out on some other things that have happened this month, but I think I’ve covered the main ones. I doubt I’ll write again before the wedding on new years day, so Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you- hope it’s great!

 

Brilliantly Birmingham Pieces

With pieces finished and in the We Are Birmingham shop, it’s time to finish up the pieces that I’m putting into Brilliantly Birmingham‘s FLUX exhibition. We’re setting up the gallery on Monday and the show opens Friday November 26th and runs til January 9th at the Midlands Art Centre in Birmingham.
I’ll be showing a few pieces from my Masters show but I have also been busy finishing new pieces! I’m really excited how things have turned out, and I’ve branched out from brooches and have added some earrings to the mix. These new pieces were made the same way as previous pieces: working from photos that inspire me to turn these objects and patterns into pieces of jewellery [if you’re new to the blog and want to find out more, see my artist statement].

As part of the FLUX exhibition, I’ll be at the Midlands Art Centre on Saturday afternoon (November 27) to talk about my creative processes and answer questions about the jewellery I make: if you’re in Birmingham that weekend, it would be great to see you!

Pieces and Their Inspirations

I’ve talked in previous posts about my inspirations and shown a few pictures here and there of specific things that inspire the pieces I made, but I thought it would be really good to put the pieces and their inspirations together in one post! I like how they’ve turned out, so I’ve included them in the Artist Statement tab so they can be seen any time. Which piece/inspiration combination do you like the best?