Fordite is becoming a very fashionable material within the jewellery design industry, although strictly not a healing crystal I did want to add some of these pieces to my jewellery collection, and launched it at the 2023 Makers Central event.

May saw me spending some extremely long days and late nights in Joolzery HQ, that is the attic in Liverpool, working on my limited edition of stunning Fordite jewellery to be launched at Makers Central at the NEC Birmingham.

Makers Central is a massive event that's uniting creativity from across the globe, by bringing massive international Youtube influencers and major hobby suppliers to the event, it's always had heavy slant towards woodturners and robotics, but there is so much to see and do over the 2 days, there's something for everyone to see and/or do!

With this in mind I thought this would be the ideal event to launch my handcrafted sterling silver Fordite jewellery collection,

Fordite????

What is Fordite you may be asking?

For those not in the know, it is the drips of paint that is leftover when cars get sprayed in the paint booth during their manufacturing process, which over time pools and forms layers and layers of paint, orginally from the Ford plants, but over the years Fordite is the generical name for any car paint derived cabochon.

After a period of time, the spray paint booth is cleaned up, resulting in the layers of waste paint drips being scrapped off the floor and/or other surfaces and sold off as slabs.

A stone cutter in South Wales buys these slabs, cuts and polishes them into theses gorgeusly stunning cabochons exposing these organicly mesmerising patterns of pearlescent paint.

The idea was to create a limited Fordite collection, so I selected a monochrome pallette of Fordite cabochons to work with:
 

Oval and Rectangular Pair Fordite Cabochons	Marquise, Round and Trillion Fordite Cabochons
Marquise and Trillion Fordite Cabochons	Oval, Trillion and Round Fordite Cabochons

I have purchased and created my limited collection of handcrafted recycled sterling silver contemporary distinctive Fordite pendants, rings, earrings and studs:
 

Recycled SS Fordite Earring and Rings	Recycled SS Fordite Studs, Pendant and Rings

As soon as I started working on this collection, my creativity went into overdrive, so I just went with it and took the opportunity to have a playaround with different earring designs:
 

Recycled SS Rectangular Fordite Earrings	Recycled SS Rectangular Fordite Earrings
Recycled SS Asymmetric Square Fordite Earrings	Recycled SS Round Fordite Earrings

The pieces did attract alot of attention at Maker Central, with visitors to the stand being blown away by the fact that all these this uniquely distinctively stunning jewellery pieces are created and/or upcycled from waste product from the car manufacturing industry.

I like to refer to Fordite as industrial sea glass, with the general consensus/response being that's just so cool!!!

I think the hardest part of designing and makig this limited edition collection was deciding what pieces should be rings and what should be pendants.  The pairs were relatively easy as it would make sense to make them into earrlings or studs, but a few of them almost became matching Mother Daughter pendants:
 

Recycled SS Round Fordite Ring	Recycled SS Trillion Fordite Ring
Recycled SS Fordite Pendants	Recycled SS Round Fordite Studs

You'll also notice that although I was going for a monochrome pallete a bit of colour did slip through under the radar.

A few of the pieces have sold at Makers Central and the Pop up in the Palmhouse Spring Market, mainly the earrings and rings, but there are still a few statement pieces available to buy which I will be uploading to the website, the weekend of  the 10th June 2023.

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May 26, 2023

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