Diary of a Rookie Silversmith: Part 1

Tail end of last year, I saw a jewellery workshop advertised in a shop in town that I thought only did picture framing. (Gallery 18 if you're interested - also sell lots of lovely cards and gifts as well as hosting the workshop.)

I thought it looked interesting and picked up a flyer, thinking yeah, I'll get round to doing that. One day.

My Christmas present from Mr Squidge was - the course! Ten weeks, learning how to make jewellery with an experienced silversmith, Alexandra Watt. I was understandably somewhat chuffed, and as this year Mr Squidge and I celebrate our silver wedding anniversary (25 years - blimey!) I started to think of all the lovely things I'd make that were silver.

The workshop is teeny - probably half the size of my kitchen - and has six workstations. They may be compact, but everything you need is close at hand. There are separate stations which have polishers and blowtorches and where you can bash metal flat.

Everything you need - including a cuppa and a notebook

I was made to feel very welcome by Lex and the two other ladies on the course. They have both had some experience already, so they just got on with things, which meant that Lex gave me pretty much one-to-one tuition in how to make a plain band ring.

I had not realised how technical working with silver is, but I did my best to take notes as we went along. By the end of the first session, most people will have completed their ring, but I didn't. The main reason was, I think, that I chose to make a pinky-ring, and selected a 2mm square wire to make it from.

Now, my hands are not very big (would look a bit strange if they were, considering I'm only five feet tall!) so it was going to be a very small thing to make. In hindsight, I should've chosen a thinner wire to work with. Or a bigger finger! Thumb ring, maybe? But that's OK, because with Lex's help, I still managed it, and learnt lots of different essential techniques along the way.

So...let me take you through the process to make my first ring. I took a few pics, but as one process naturally moved into another, I didn't always have time to take them for every stage.

1. Size your ring - Mine was 15mm internal diameter. 

2. Work out what length of wire you need (ugh - maths! Internal diameter x Pi + metal thickness and a bit of wastage. = 51mm. Told you my fingers were small!)

3. Cut the wire to the required length, making sure to file the end if you need to, to make it flat, and then saw through at the right point. (Apparently I was a natural at sawing...though not at filing. I forgot to do it!)

4. Using a ring mandrel and a rawhide mallet, bash your wire, turning it all the while until it's pretty much circular. (Mine...wasn't. It stayed horseshoe shaped for quite a while.)

5. Anneal the metal - heat with a blowtorch until orange-red, then quench in water. (Hitting metal makes it harder, so it needs annealing to make it pliable again ready for the next stage.) Dry the ring.

6. Pickle it. Not, not like chutney! It's dropped into an acid mix kept at temperature, until it goes white. Rinse and dry.

7. Close the ring - you push the ends together, but end up with a V-shaped gap. You have to make several passes with a saw (I had to do three) to remove this V and enable the ends of the ring to really butt up across the whole end face. Need to point out here that my ring was twisted - so there was an extra stage of flattening involved! Much banging followed, along with a warning so the rest of the folks could put their ear-plugs in... Tension the ring to make sure the ends really do sit tight together.

Decidedly unround...and unflat!

8. Seal the join with flux. This was a very complicated stage, but if you've ever soldered a join before, it's exactly the same, except I used small snips of hard solder rather than a wire.

9. Anneal the ring again, before working it into a perfect circle on the ring mandrel.

Rounder - and flatter!

10. Sand flat faces (the sides of the ring) - work up the grades of sandpaper to flatten the surface and work out any imperfections. I had to use a figure-of-eight motion on a flat surface and it took FOREVER, because although Lex had helped me flatten the ring as much as possible, it still wasn't perfect. When you think it's really, really flat through sanding, you switch to a straight sanding movement, move to the next finest grade of sandpaper, and repeat the figure-of-eight move until all those straight scratches have disappeared. Then you repeat the straight sand on the finer grade and move to a slightly finer paper again... Repeat for finer grades of sandpaper until the ring is smooth and satiny!

This was the most time-consuming and labour intensive phase - I did some at home and found myself redoing it because I could still see deep scratches I'd left in my hurry to get on with it! I think patience is definitely the word to be applied to this stage.

11. Sand the outside and inside faces - at this stage, the outside edges of my square wire ring were champfered with an emery stick to take the sharp edge off, and a sandpaper-wrapped dowelling used at a 45-degree angle to take off the inside edge.

12. Add texture if required. The other ladies were showing me rings they'd made with textured finishes, and I quite liked them, so I went for a ball hammer and started banging again...

Texture on three faces

13. Polish with a fluffy mop. Nothing to do with kitchen floors, but a small rotating head with a very soft brush which you dip in wax to lubricate and use at high speed on the ring until it shines... (Not too much though, or you can polish out the texture you've just added.)

And voila! After three hours (over two weeks) I had a finished pinky-ring. My first item of handmade silver jewellery - hooray!

My next project is a pendant design. Look out for Part 2 in a couple of weeks time, or whenever I manage to finish it!