Berlin Berlin

I am once again living in Germany! I loved it here so much as an exchange student I decided to come live here for a year, but this time not as a jeweller, but as an Au-pair. Now I find myself reminiscing on projects and jewels i made two years ago when I was studying here and missing my jewellery bench so much.

Probably my all time favourite project in all my years of studying was this project we did in Berlin. For this project we spent a week in the Technical Museum in Berlin and experimented with old jewellery machinery.  We were basically part of the exhibition. We worked with these old machinery while tourists in walking through the museum watching us through the glass windows. Quite a strange experience! The aim of the game was to use the old machines and techniques and come up with new modern ways to make jewellery with it. There were old German masters that explained to us how to use the machinery. They could not speak a word English which made it real tricky, but we all got there in the end.

After the week in Berlin, including some touristy adventures, we headed back to Pforzheim where we spent the rest of the term refining our pieces. We used the experimental pieces we made in the museum and turned into contemporary jewellery ranges.  My range consisted of these brass brooches.  I used an old machine that stamped shapes into metal. It had a big heavy metal block that you raised with your foot with a pulley system. When you lifted your foot the metal block would fall down about a meter and hit a shape into your metal with a picture stamp. I used different leaf shaped stamps. The leaves then curl to the back to form part of the brooch pin.

Two of these brooches are now displayed in the Technik Mueseum in Berlin 🙂