Please visit the new wedding section of the website. I am madly making for brides to be and their bridal party, and I am also uploading some of my own designs, inspired by delicacy, elegance and simple beauty, which can be purchased in the usual way. Please take a look and get in touch if I can help you with your wedding preparations!

http://www.beckytoughill.co.uk/wedding-jewellery.html

At last I've added a new Valentines gallery! It can be found on the left navigation and through the third slide on the homepage.

Valentines is a one stop gallery designed to highlight the best hearty morsels on the website. Spend over £12.00 before 10th February 2012 and receive a complimentary Valentines card too, with postage still free in the UK.

http://www.beckytoughill.co.uk/valentines1.html

Can you believe it? In addition to the Valentines competition I've decided to do this... on all orders made through the website that are £12.00 and over, I'm going to throw in a free handmade Valentines card. This website has all the ingredients for that thoughtful and perfect gift.

Not only do I include p+p in all my prices, but I will thoughtfully gift wrap each item you buy, include a gift tag (which can be written for you if you wish) and now also send you a free Valentines card made by my own fair hands. These cards are not to be sniffed at... especially as they range from £2.00-£4.00 per card. Each has totally unique and you can choose between male and female cards.

Just make Handmade Jewellery your first stop for Valentines goodies and you're halfway there!

So it's here!! The new giveaway competition. I've been madly making lots of lovely gifts for Valentines and I want the world to know about it! One lucky fan will win a very fine piece of jewellery worth £20.00 for five seconds of their time and a few clicks... this is what you have to do:

The next status (which will go live at 20:15 GMT today) is my special Valentines post. To be entered for the competition, you must share it with your facebook friends (a little personal comment would also be much appreciated!). New people who become fans of the page, can also share and enter. The status will re-entered regularly on the wall throughout the competition for easy access. After the first five shares from different people the competition is officially on!

The deadline for shares is Thursday 9th Feb at 19:00. All those who share starting tonight, will be entered into the draw, and a winner chosen by random.org. The result will be announced later that evening. Any deleted shares will be withdrawn. Lets hunt some fans!!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Becky-Toughill-Handmade-Jewellery/231722233521230

To celebrate Christmas, I am giving away free postage and packaging to orders, with luscious gift wrapping, care cards and money off the next order when a purchase is reviewed on Free Index. And the Christmas orders are arriving thick and fast, so bag yourself some handmade jewellery now, before it is too late. 

I recently made some great memory wire bracelets, which I've put on Facebook, and in a bid to get more likes, when we hit 100 likers, I'm going to select one person at random and they will win a beautiful piece of handmade jewellery worth £15!! The more you spread the word, the higher the figures. When we hit 200, there will be two give aways and so on. Thanks to all the lovely people who have been sharing my link on facebook too and following me on Twitter. You're fab and great and totally on the Christmas card list!! 
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Becky-Toughill-Handmade-Jewellery/231722233521230?ref=tn_tnmn

Thanks to everyone who has been showing their support and placing orders for Christmas - I have been dreaming of beads and threading and my eyes have gone googly with joy at the amount of commissions I've been making.

I have new designs that I am currently working on too - these will be going online very soon and I will put some links on here too.

Lastly, a big push on the facebook front! I'm working towards a target of 100 likers by the end of the week, and 200 by the end of next month, so PLEASE, share the Handmade Jewellery link, and get word out so we can run more prize draws and touch more people with the beady bug.

This is a post to thank Rikki Scott and all the wonderful staff and patrons at The Crown in Melton Mowbray, for their warm welcome and support at this evening's jewellery event. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and was made to feel welcome from the moment I entered. A fab group of people, with a passion for jewellery which is always good to see. We raised a really encouraging amount of money for charity from the raffle, and with more commissions to come, hopefully the total will go up further. A lot of the items on the site have consequently sold, which is wonderful, and I will be madly making more pieces very soon for more Christmas purchases. 

Thank you to everyone who made the evening fun, and bought an item of jewellery, greetings card, bow or tag! And thank you to Rikki for letting me show my pieces, it has been an absolute pleasure! 

Cambridgeshire based gown boutique Swanky Rags is currently branching out into designer wedding wear and Handmade Jewellery will be adorning the brides to be with co-ordinating, bespoke and specially designed freshwater pearl pieces. 

The great thing about freshwater pearls is that they do not catch or snag on satin, silk or other fabrics commonly used for bridal gowns. Freshwater pearls are durable, surprisingly light weight and have a beautiful and unique lustre rarely captured by other materials. 

The pieces on sale are exclusive to Swanky Rags and will not be available on the website. 

When I first started making jewellery, I didn't realise at the time how difficult it would be to sell sell sell. By this I mean, market yourself and not only design pretty things that you enjoyed making and wearing, but things that others enjoyed buying and wearing. After all, as nice as it is to have a hobby, where exactly is the use of having lots of beautiful jewellery if you have no one to show it to, or even worse, not a soul who will buy it.

After attending many networking events locally, doing horrible town markets in remote street locations in the freezing cold (not to mention losing my sanity and when the wind blew, half my wares down the walkway), I realised that although both were great exercise, there had to be an easier way. I am not ashamed to say I was turned down by Design Factory and Craft In Focus, due to the fact that I didn't have ' a clear discipline', only one of the problems that creative people who are into everything like me, find really frustrating. It is almost as if, just because you want to have a go at different things, you're blighted by the attitude that you can't be good at them. As a total contrast to this, countless amounts of artists both past and present, find every day that seeing something that influences them and then using it in their work changes it. There is nothing worse than being pigeon-holed as an 'artist' or 'sculpturer' or 'photographer'. I use textiles, beading, wire work, photography and print in my work, where do I fit? And why do I have to? Can't I just make pretty things and sell them?

So what did I do? Well, I set up a website. This was a great exercise for me, although I'm not sure which was the most exhausting, running down a street after my wind swept earrings and necklaces, or surfing cyber space for useful hints as to how the devil I was going to get noticed online. This is still a huge concern, and as the way people shop and source things is changing, so is the internet and the kind of experience people expect. Certainly design and layout of a site is something that I have had to work on a lot in the last five years. Fancy flash is good, but if it is going to take ages to launch then its best not to bother. On average, people spend 15 seconds on a site before they move on, less if they don't like it. So its got to be the best 15 seconds they'll ever have; in cyber surf terms anyway. I'm not saying I give people that, but I try very hard to give a clear and clean identity to my jewellery, with a range of angles and perpspectives that will help to capture the essence of what that piece of jewellery or stationary is about. This is something that I am still playing with.

I am now about the launch my Etsy and Folksy sites. I'm finding out this is a full time job in itself. Circles, favourites, forums, treasuries currently makes as much sense to me as GCSE Higher Maths in Year ten with Mr Plaistow. But it's all part of the creative journey I guess, so I'd better get my creative toe-capped boots on and man up!!

A lot of people at the gallery have been asking about my background and training, so I thought perhaps the same were true of my website visitors. Luckily this is easily rectified, so here is a little background in a nutshell and the objectives of why I make, sew, crimp, paint and go nuts for the handmade! 

Being creative is my passion. Since a young age I have always drawn, sketched and sculpted. After taking my A Levels, I trained in Graphic Design and later took my BA(Hons) in Textile Design. I discovered jewellery making somewhere between the two; taking a silver smithing course at a local college. From there I dabbled in bead work and learnt what I could from books and tutorials, as well as filling various sketch books with ideas and articles. I now stock nationwide to many boutiques and galleries, as well as make to order on wedding accessories and stationary.

After my degree, I embarked on a PGCE in Secondary Education and became a teacher of Food, Textiles and later Art and Photography. Teaching (in my opinion) is one of the best jobs in the world - second only to making jewellery (or being a food critic I think), so I am very lucky to be able to do both. 

I am inspired by so much - a lot of which I am not alone in; people, architecture, trends, colour and organic material. But what also fascinates me from a textile and fine art point of view, is texture, both touchable and visual. My jewellery is not about what the masses want to wear for a season, it is about a personal response to the materials I combine. Something that is classic and cannot be repeated. I mix and match textures, offset colours and juxtapose large and small beads to almost rebel against the 'safe' disposable jewellery seen in so many commercial outlets.

What the customer receives is a handmade and well designed piece, with its own unique name, charm and identity.