[I forgot to hit publish on this one, this was finished before the third project]
The second project in the jewelry course (check out my first ring!), was to make something with a fair amount of soldering. The examples I got were a link bracelet or necklace. Since I still don’t wear much jewelry, I didn’t necessarily want to acquire a lot of silver for a necklace that wouldn’t see much wear. So I opted for a bracelet.
After a bit of heavy Pinteresting, I settled on a leaf design, inspired by this pin and this pin. I made an example link in copper wire to see if it was possible and then measured how big I wanted it to be. I had to size down the design a little because my wrist is quite thin and I wanted to have five links. Then came the endless period of stretching a bar of silver to a much longer and thinner wire. It was a very interesting process that involved annealing (heating up and cooling down), lots of manual turning of cranks and pulling through tiny holes, but I ended up with enough wire to make my links.
After I had the links, I made some little loops to connect the links together. All was soldered and I only melted one bit a little, something that a little sanding can make much less obvious. Once it was all connected, I had to think off a closure method and settled on an elongated pin that could pull through the loop on the last link. It works quite well so far. Some more sanding and polishing and then it was ready for wear.
I like the jingling it does, but it will probably not see much wear.
