Jewellery Making With Amy Surman
Earlier this month, Anna and I headed to Amy Surman’s jewellery workshop and store on Wilkins Road, just behind Hollow Way, to learn a bit about silversmithing and jewellery making!
Amy has run her business selling a fantastic array of jewellery making supplies and running workshops for 13 years, and last year expanding the shop premise to incorporate a stand along workshop area.
Amy’s passion for metal work started at a young age while helping her dad with carpentry jobs and becoming fascinated with tools and creating. At school she was often found in the Design & Technology lab at lunch times working on projects, and later went on to study metal work and jewellery design at university before completing a PGCE. With this passion to create, she set about opening her shop to make jewellery making supplies accessible locally, but more importantly to create a space where she could teach her skills and pass on knowledge with her signature friendly, warm and open style.
The reason that Amy’s workshops and private tutorial sessions really work, isn’t just that she is an extremely talented crafts person, but that her years of experience in teaching make the techniques and information accessible and clear to her students. She has an innate ability to convey her meaning in a candid and reassuring way, that means groups from hen parties to corporate teams get an enormous amount of value out of the experience, of course as well as their own creations.
Amy runs a whole range of jewellery making workshops from silversmithing to precious metal clay, and enamelling to beading. She even runs private sessions so you can make your own engagement ring, or wedding rings, as well as creating bespoke commissions to breathe new life into old jewellery by melting down and reusing gems to make a new piece – sustainable jewellery in action!
In February she will be holding workshops that include silver mixed ability classes, enamelling and a precious metal clay taster session to get to grips with the material.
If you’d like to find out more about Amy’s workshops, tuition and kids workshops, check out her website. Being creative is a essential to our wellbeing, and learning a new skill is great for our brain function. On top of that, being able to do this in a community setting is the icing on the cake. Community is the foundations to our happiness and the more we connect with the people around us, the happier we will be. Amy helps us to do just that.
Please do share your workshop experiences, we’d love to see what you made and how much you enjoyed the session. Comment below, or tag us on Instagram.
Love,
Rosie
xxx
