I’ve grown up with horses and I’ve always loved silver jewellery. When I go into a jewellery shop, I usually walk straight over to the silver necklaces and rings, and then try to find any pieces which are horse related. But I certainly never thought I could actually design and make any of these myself……..

Late last year I did a local beading course, which I really enjoyed. What I wasn’t really happy with what I ended up with. Sure they were made well, and had complicated designs, but at the end of the day they were a little too colourful for me, and if the strings got caught on anything they tended to break. Fun to make – yes. Something that I would treasure and keep for a long time – no.

I’m more of a silver girl really. So I started to think about what kind of silver equestrian jewellery I’d like to own. I’d love something with some plaited horse hair in it, but then again I think I’d like it set in silver, as I wanted it to be special and to keep it for a long time.

I’d searched on the web so I saw a lot of this jewellery which had horse hair as the main component, but I’d prefer the horse hair just as a small ‘highlight’ of the jewellery, but not as the main part. Also – I like girly stuff – so I wanted it to be cute.

So where to start! First up, into amazon and I started to look up all of the jewelry books. The search inside cover option was really useful, so I often find with books like this the front cover design can look great but there’s not much info in the book. I ended up getting three or four books, and read them from cover to cover when they arrived.

At this stage, fired up with enthusiasm, I got a little horse tail hair from my horse, and started to see how you’d actually go about washing, preparing and braiding some hair. To wash it, I first put a small plaiting band on it to keep it together, then into the sick with hot soapy water, and then left it to dry. After this I sat down in front of the fire with my old box of beads, and started to make some pieces.

Yep they were cute, but I was still thinking about using silver in them. Of course I had no silver and no idea how you make things out of silver, so approximately one week later I found myself at the far side of the city, walking up a small narrow lane towards a small shed, and inside the shed was six jewellery stations, various pieces of machinery, polishers and burner type things, and one lovely guy who was going to teach us. For €20 I spent the next two hours working on a pendant out of scrap silver (a bit of a disaster!) but I ended up making my first silver ring and my imagination had gone into overdrive!

As we left, I promised to come back again in a few weeks, bringing with me horse hair so we can see the best way to secure the ends of the braids, and I was given orders to buy a small sheet of silver, and some rose gold piping.

It’s quite dangerous to ask me to go shopping! A week later, I was now the proud owner of a square of silver, a piece of gold piping, four more jewellery books, and something wonderful which I found called precious clay metal.

But having the basic ingredients is only one part of making jewellery…. What exactly was I going to make? As I fell asleep that night my brain was busy working out different designs, and I only hoped I would be able to remember them all on the morning…

Once the alarm went off the next day, I jumped out of bed. It was time to start drawing…… I’ve now got five necklaces, two rings and three bracelets designed and ready to start creating for real, in my next silver jewellery class.

Here are the pictures of what I’ve made so far: http://irishhorsemanship.com/shop/silver-jewellery/ If you like them, let me know!