Channel your inspirations and ideas – mood boards and Pinterest

Where do you find inspirations from? Do you have a fashion magazine that is a must flick through?

And how do you organise your ideas and inspirations so that they result in new jewellery designs?

For example, Bronagh, our press and membership co-ordinator, is interested in textiles as well as jewellery and often finds inspirations and style ideas from Harpers Bazaar. In the past this meant she had lots of torn sheets from magazines but these days she is more likely to photograph pages with her phone and attach them to an evernote.com file or use Pinterest to collect images from the internet.

Images cut out of magazine are a great way to create a mood board – a collection of images that show the design direction and help collect your ideas in one place to focus on design, colours and style.

The mood boards here are by students on our one-day fashion jewellery course which involves making a mood board before designing and creating jewellery based on the ideas behind the board.

But you can now avoid the scissors and glue stage if you want.

The internet makes creating mood boards easier and harder at the same time. It is very easy to find images that attract or inspire you – a Google search or browsing on Flickr, as well as fashion magazine sites, will give you a vast quantity to chose from.

But there is so much to look at that you could go off in a lot of disparate directions so it is important to use a blog (see Some Beautiful Place for an example), online notebook (like evernote.com)  or Pinterest.com to bring the images together (virtual mood board) so you can keep track of whether the things you like work together.

Pinterest can be a useful way to do this because it is designed to create “boards” where you collect the images under themes or headings.

It’s a free site and you have the extra advantage of being able to look at other people’s boards and even “pin” items from their collections to your own to help build up you ideas.

If you haven’t come across Pinterest before why not make a start by looking at the LJS boards and exploring from there – but be warned like searching for pictures on Flickr or Google you could find more to fascinate you than you ever expected.

So do remember that you are looking for ideas to inspire your jewellery making – so leave yourself time to actually create as well.