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.