Tag: Jewelry

Silver Leaf

Little silver leaf bracelet.

[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.

Waves Ring

Making a shiny wave ring.

I’ve been taking a jewelry making course for the past couple of months. It’s been fun and I’ve been severely challenged in the patience department. The first classes were about reading measuring tools, how to saw, what soldering entails and how much sanding is going to be required for any project. Then we got started on our first item.

For the first project, we needed to make a ring composed of a simple inner ring and an outer ring with some sort of decoration it. Since I never wear rings, I didn’t want to make a giant thing, but it needed some size in order to get a decoration in it. What I settled on is making a short-ish inner ring, and then make an even shorter outer ring with a flat bottom edge and a wavy top edge. Once I managed the sawing of the outer ring, I also decided to drill some holes and saw some lines for more wave action.

Then there was some amount of sanding and polishing before soldering the two rings together. There’s one line decoration that came out great, and two that were partially filled in during the soldering process – can’t be perfect when you’re still learning. On to so many sessions of filing, sanding and polishing the thing to a high sheen. I learned about something that translates to ‘skin spots’, which is apparently copper coming out on the surface of the silver and looks like a dirty spot. I managed to get them all out in the end though. I have still not managed to wear it for a full day and I’m not sure that I ever will, but the process and the people in the class make it very enjoyable.