MooBeeTees: MooBeeView #10: TopazTurtle

Welcome to the August MooBeeView with TopazTurtle. The fabulous jeweller behind TopazTurtle is Saunthra who works her magic with resin and other creative media. The end result? Wonderful, colourful pieces of art that you wear with a smile on your face.

As well as answering MooBeeTees' Fabulous Four Questions, TopazTurtle is offering a Giveaway especially for MooBeeView readers. Just click on the 'August Giveaway' tab to see how you can enter :)

So sit back and enjoy a few minutes with TopazTurtle...

1) Of all the media available to you as a jeweller, what is it about resin that has drawn you to it as a major medium for your jewellery?
What drew me most to resin and what makes me keep going back to it was the ability to inject colour into the pieces I create. I have tried my hand at a number of different types of jewellery making. I played around with metal for a bit but found the colours limiting and personally uninspiring. I use beads and wire too but again found the colours not exactly right.

When I was given a resin jewellery making course as a birthday gift, it was an eye opener to how versatile resin is. When I was setting myself up as a resin jewellery maker buying pigments was a joy and a strain. I wanted to buy everything! I first started by buying the primary colours rightly thinking I could mix all my own colours. Gradually, once I had a better idea of what I wanted from my designs I bought other colours as well.

I still have my primary colours and I still do my own mixing to get that exact right shade.

2) Circles, rounded edges, spheres, smoothness - even your spikes are rounded! Tell us, what have you got against corners? How do you determine your design shapes?
No, I'm an equal opportunity designer. I don’t discriminate against corners!

Seriously though, most of my shapes are rounded as a matter of comfort rather than design. I can make some beautifully sharp corners with resin but very early on I found that this makes jewellery quite uncomfortable to wear. As a result I spend quite a lot of time sanding back sharp edges and corners to ensure that the piece of jewellery is smooth with rounded edges.

3) You use a lot of colour in your work. How does colour inspire you in the creation of your pieces?
Colour is an integral part of my work with resin and it’s what drew me to the medium in the first place. Colour doesn’t inspire me as much as things happening around me inspire me to create with a specific colour. Just take for example the song ‘Airplanes’ by B.O.B. It has these lyrics that go ‘can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are shooting stars” and that line was going round and round in my head and led me to create the dark blue beads in the pictured necklace.It has gold streaks in them that look like shooting stars. Sometimes it’s a line from a book, flowers in my garden, clothes or a scene from a movie that drives me to work with a particular colour. When I work with bright cheerful colours, it usually an indication that I have been having a particularly grey week.

The marriage of colours and shapes is another issue altogether and I usually let my subconscious guide me as I feel very strongly about using some colour and shapes.

4: What has been your biggest resin disaster (come on, we've all had one!) and what did you take from this experience and turn into a complete success?
I have had a number of disasters. Very early on I was experimenting with embedding fibres in resin and the fibres I tried to use caused this foaming effect and huge bubbles in the bangle. I think there is actually a picture of it somewhere. I stayed away from fibre as a result.

Another time I added too much pigment to the resin (I was going for a very deep colour) and as a result it made the cuff that I poured very soft. I couldn’t understand initially why the cuff kept falling off and others didn’t! What a way to learn the lesson about what too much pigment can do.

(MooBeeView Note: All pictures in this interview are successes! No disasters present!)

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I'd like to thank TopazTurtle's Saunthra for taking the time to answer my questions and letting us in to her world of beautiful wearable art. If you want to learn more about TopazTurtle, please visit one of the following online sites: