Biz of Art - Production Work

While I love creating individual, one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry, I sometimes need to do what I refer to as production work. To me this means taking a design that has been popular, is easy to make, and I have plenty of supplies for and then making many repetitions of this design. During the show season I am so busy that I turn over my inventory fairly rapidly. So production work is a necessity when you are trying to sell enough to pay your every day bills.

I still try and add some individuality to each piece by changing an accent bead, the color theme, or the metal used.  Here are some recent examples.

 In this first series I am using a small wedge of picture jasper as the focal stone. This batch is black seed beads and various pewter accents with pewter clasps.

 Next up I switched to using brown seed beads and copper or pearls with copper clasps.

 The last batch I went back to pewter, but this time with a grey blue seed bead.

 In this series I stuck with the same overall design, but used a wedge shaped agate. 

Here they are mixed with agate accents.

And in the last batch I used black glass beads as accents.