This year was my first time visiting the International Jewellery London. A show which has not only been showcasing beautiful jewellery for over 60 years but also provides a huge variety of gemstones, new technology and many other things around jewellery for customers and suppliers. 

Fellow jewellery makers had been talking about it for months so I was very excited to be able to go and see it for myself for the first time. 

The show takes place at Olympia in London which is a wonderful and impressive space stretching over 2 levels. Here you can find everything - international brands to small independent businesses presenting their creations. 

I very much enjoyed looking around all the different stalls with thousands of different stones, pearls and other shiny objects like this quartz. 

This rutilated quartz below really caught my eye and my mind began racing with all the different ideas of how I could incorporate it into my work. This stone contains small needle-like inclusions of tourmaline showing up as black lines within the clear quartz. This creates a very interesting three-dimensional pattern within the stone. 

One of the highlights of my visit was when I bumped into the brilliant Andrew Berry, a jewellery designer and teacher who has taught me so much about designing and making jewellery over the past year through his classes on his Youtube channel. He gave me the confidence to practice and get me to this point.