Dairy of a Rookie Silversmith: Part 2

This really ought to be titled 'Part 2, almost' because I haven't got as far as I'd have liked to by week 4 of my course, thanks to an inability to solder. 

You might remember I'm on a silversmithing course, and in Part 1, I described my first project: a pinky ring. 

I'd collected images of things I'd like to try for my second project, so I talked a few over with Lex (the tutor) to see which she thought would be best to tackle as a rookie. Have to say, Lex is willing to give anything a go, so I settled on making a pendant, and went home at the end of week 2 to produce a life sized template of my design. 

I'd already begun to play with the original abstract design I'd found, turning it into a recognisable 'tree', I was able in the back end of week 2 to assemble and prep my materials. I chose a 'pebble' textured rolled silver sheet for the base disc, and cut lengths of different thickness wires to use for the 'branches' and 'trunk'. 

The raw materials of a tree pendant

I needed to cut the base disc, so I had a practise on a little bit of copper first, because a curve is rather hard to achieve smoothly. I was very pleased with the end result of my practise though, and got the knack of turning sharp corners - even though there shouldn't be any on my disc!

Practising on copper

Then it was onto the silver - and boy, was it hard work. You just have to keep on sawing, because it's hard to take the saw blade away from your work. I think it took me about 15 minutes to end up with this;

My base disc

And these!!

Fingers covered in silver dust after my epic sawing session!

At home, I played around with my designs for the 'tree' and settled on one. I added colour to indicate stones, but as that's one of the last things to attach, it didn't have to be (no pun intended) set in stone at this point. 

Week 3 saw me preparing everything I'd need to make my tree. The trunk was a 2mm wire, flattened along it's length to a variety of widths. I learnt that depending on how you place your wire, you'll either get an increase in width or in length. I got a bit of both! And it gets to a point where the metal starts to 'ting' when you hit it instead of making a 'thud' - which is an indicator that you need to anneal the metal to soften it up again. It's also easier to put any curve into wires before you flatten them, as it's too hard to do it afterwards. The branches, cut to length from 1.8mm wire were also slightly flattened at one end, which I filed flat so they'd sit snugly in line with the trunk...

Playing with designs and bits of 'branch'

The end result - looks a pretty good match

Even better when placed on the base disc

The base disc was annealed, flattened, and then it was on to soldering.

I am terrible at soldering! Three times, I tried to solder just the trunk to the disc, and three times it didn't work properly. Lex had to help me in the end, and there were still gaps. It might be because the base is quite thick, so heating up the silver to soldering point is difficult to get right, and it might also be because I've not really soldered anything other than one joint in my pinky ring, and I simply need to improve.

Whatever the reason, I began week 4 by revisiting the soldering of the trunk and adding the branches. After the first attempt, two branches fell off. 

All set up on the blocks, ready to heat from underneath

The frustrating thing is that whenever you solder, you have to pickle your piece again before resoldering, which takes time. Anyway...between me and Lex (mainly Lex!) and with extra pallions, we finally got the branches on securely and the whole thing pickled.

The finally-soldered, pickled piece
(which is why it looks white)

Now I could really crack on. Next step - doming. I had to use a small wooden peg (not metal, as it would've flattened my blood-sweat-and-tears soldered bits!) to bash my pendant until it took on the shape of the dome mould. You can see in the second pic that it has a lovely shallow curve to it.

Ready to hit...

The finished dome

There wasn't much time to do any more metalwork (you might have spotted that my trunk's a bit long, and needs to be sawn or filed down, for eg) but there was time to choose stones.

Now my original design had three, dotted around the branches. But in light of my poor soldering skill, I decided to cut it down to one. Lex allowed me to look through her stone box, and I made the mistake first of picking cabochons, not faceted stones. But eventually I found these two beauties; I just couldn't decide which to go for.

Blue...

...or clear?

In the end, I went for the clear stone, because I wear a lot of colour and would not want to limit myself to what I can wear with my finished pendant! 

So that's where I am at the moment. Next week, I'll be making a setting for the stone, soldering it into the base (eeek!) and also soldering a bale on the back before polishing it up. I hope so, anyway...

And meanwhile, I'm beginning to think about my third project. I want to make myself a silver ring with a clear stone in it, to wear on my wedding finger permanently to mark my silver wedding anniversary. Not too much soldering in that one, thank goodness!

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!

The Medusa Medallion

One of the ideas for the blog challenge today is 'online shopping'; the Etsy site was mentioned as a source of ideas. Now, I happen to have a cloudie friend who is an incredibly talented artist, who is selling some exquisite handmade pendants and brooches. Check out some of her other designs here. Anyway, as she's selling on Etsy, I thought I would use one of her creations to write a very short, short story for my post today. Here 'tis...

The Medusa Medallion.

I nearly missed it, buried as it was at the bottom of the box among a tangled knot of broken chains and skittering loose beads. I'd reached for the moonstone, wondering what could glow so brightly in the dark recesses of the broken casket. When I picked it out, she followed.

Was it just a trick that made the snakes appear to writhe and coil around her green face, their tiny eyes glittering in the lamplight? I know she glared at me for disturbing her slumber, one eye all-seeing, the other an empty crystal orb. 

I took her to the window to examine my find, where I saw her delicate features caressed by repulsive reptiles. Such beauty, wrapped in a nightmare. She hung loose from the chain I'd wrapped around my fingers, twisting around slowly until she faced me again.

The moonstone beneath her chin glowed; I saw it, but did not understand.    

Not until I felt my body stiffening.