• 2 months ago
We speak to businesses based in the birthplace of Charles Darwin in Shrewsbury about their work
Transcript
00:00And this is my signature Ferretia collection. Ferretia started life in my mother's indigenous
00:08garden on the coast of Kenya, East Africa, and the Ferretia is a very beautiful tropical flower
00:16there. It has inspired this collection, so I do a stallion that links the leaf to the raindrop
00:22and the flower, so a lot of these pieces will have the stallion with her casing behind there.
00:30There's a small amount here of resonance of a trip to Yosemite National Park in California,
00:39and so it's all to do with rivers and granite and boulders and amazing landscape echo there.
00:50A lot of my jewellery is embedded in the natural world, hence my interest in Darwin,
00:55and I really need to echo the legacy that Darwin has left us.
01:02Working here in Darwin House is a huge privilege, and anyone that comes to work with me in the
01:08workshops over here, this is where you'll all be sitting while you have a wonderful time creating
01:14something beautiful here using silver clay, which is precious metal clay, and you can
01:22make something in three hours that would be a memory of a special piece that you're taking
01:29away with you that reflects your time in Darwin House. For instance, the damiote leaves that you
01:36can paint in pure silver, and you can come and work with friends together. We do special
01:46workshops that include celebration hospitality. You can just come and work with a friend,
01:51you can join a group. Evenings and weekends, we all have a really lovely time in here making
01:58jewellery from precious metal clay. It's accessible, and you can cut it, shape it, texture it,
02:07mould it, and create something lovely.
02:14Here is a starting point. It looks very simple. It's bits of cardboard, it's bits of wood,
02:21but this is the best way of seeing do things fit or not. It's pretty low-tech,
02:27but it's one of the best ways of doing it. And after that, we'll create a circuit board. Here's
02:32our first one. It only took us a month or so. We improved it, came up with this one,
02:39but that didn't work because it got too hot. So we tried again. This one was better,
02:46and then we put this one here into here, the enclosure. But then we realised,
02:52oh, you can't stick your fingers down there. Let's try again. So we made it shallower,
02:59a bit longer, and then a bit longer still, and this is our first charger.
03:06It worked very well, but we still wanted to make more improvements.
03:11We went back to the drawing board on the circuit board, and this is what we came up with.
03:18It's pretty simple, and there's the enclosure for it.