We speak to businesses based in the birthplace of Charles Darwin about their work

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.