Pass It Along – a new way to inspire jewellers

LJS tutor Penny Akester started the Pass It Along jewellery challenge this year. But what is it?

The Pass It Along project is a group jewellery making challenge – it was open to any jeweller who was interested in challenging themselves. It is designed to enable unexpected and unplanned collaboration between makers – to generate new ideas and inspiration, as well as connections with other jewellers.

The idea is based on the idea of a chain letter, game of pass the parcel, or a game of consequences – everyone taking part is allocated one of three themes, and starts to make a piece of jewellery, they don’t complete the piece however, they pass it along to someone else in the group that will then continue work on the jewel. It will be passed along to a third person who will pull the piece together and complete it / make it wearable, then on to a fourth who will get to keep the piece, and who will share images of the piece. It means that everyone who signs up will get to take part at each stage of the project, and everyone gets to keep a jewel too.

The groupings are completely random between all of those that signed up, and the idea is that we will all have different skills, styles of work and use different materials, so at the pieces are passed along between us, they should give challenging design opportunities of how to work with something unexpected, that we are not used to dealing with, and in technical terms as the piece we receive may not be in materials we are familiar with working with.

How did the project come about?

It came about as I was looking for a personal challenge or collaborative project to take part in to keep me inspired and trying new things with my jewellery making, but I didn’t see one that was open for applications at the time so I thought I’d organise my own.

Who is involved in the project?

So far it’s been going really well – there are 56 people signed up and taking part from all around the UK (including several other LJS tutors), Europe and the USA and we are currently about halfway through stage 2. If you check out our facebook page (see below) you will be able to get an idea of all the different jewellers that are taking part – I’m sharing links to the work of all the participating jewellers, one by one on this page.

More information is available on the dedicated web page and on our facebook page.

We are keeping the images of work in progress private until all of the pieces are completed, so as not to influence each other and so that we all get an exciting surprise at the end but images should start appearing online on these pages towards the end of April. You can also check out the hashtag #passitalongproject on Instagram and twitter around that time.

We will be featuring some images of some of the completed pieces along with reflections from other LJS tutors involved in the project in future blog posts