Dairy of a Rookie Silversmith - Part 5.

You might remember that, in the last week of my ten week course, I wanted to make a bangle. 

I had soldered a ring of 2mm wire in week 9, and twisted it into an infinity symbol at home. (Basically, grab both sides of the ring and twist in opposite directions until you have a figure of eight.) In week 10, that final week, I evened the shape up and soldered the crossing point together. Although in hindsight, I'd have been better NOT putting the original solder point from the ring at the point where I was going to solder again...I managed to un-solder the original join. I also soldered two cut rings onto either end of the infinity symbol.

Then it was a case of forming the base bangle (3mm wire) on an oval bangle mandrel (try saying that one fast!) and turning the ends over to provide a loop and a hook; one end of the symbol would be fixed into the loop, the other would catch on the hook, providing a 'hinge'.

As you can imagine, I was working to a deadline, so I didn't stop to take any photos, even though I had my camera with me.

Just this afternoon, I popped down to the gallery to finish it - filed a little off the 'hook' end to make the bangle easier to fasten - tensioned (by hitting gently all over the bangle) and polished.

Here's what I ended up with;

Here's what it looks like on;

And here's the 'hinge' clasp;

I'm pleased with it, although as per the other items I've made, I still think there are things I haven't got quite right. For example, I don't seem to be able to do the polishing very well. Perhaps I'm too impatient, but all my finished items seem to have a slightly matt finish. Which is fine, but I'd like to crack the knack of how to make silver really, REALLY shiny! I think the bangle could do with a really high shine.

I'm also not sure that the bangle is tensioned properly. Each time I thought I'd done it and put it on to check, the bangle would deform as I took it off - to the extent that I had to reshape on the oval bangle mandrel several times. That can't be right.

Oh, and remember the ring that wasn't yet polished? Here I am, wearing it after I polished it, to try it out (Not going to be wearing it all the time until our Silver Wedding next month) 

You might have noticed that I'm wearing the pinky ring on my left hand now, although it was made for my right little finger. Reason being, I found that it was making my finger swell at night, so I'm assuming it's a tad too tight. Either way, it sits fine on the left hand, and doesn't interfere with the sapphire ring I've made.Maybe one day, I'll make another for the right hand and size it up a bit!

I've loved being able to make my own jewellery. Even if none of it is 100% perfect, it's all mine and unique, as well as two of the pieces being symbolic for me and Mr Squidge.

Would I do a silversmithing course or workshop again? In a heartbeat, though I think I would have to pick a really simple project to make the most of the lesson/workshop time, and make sure I really took my time over each stage to get that smooth, high shine finish that looks so beautiful on silver. 

Diary of a Rookie Silversmith - Definitely Part 4

Well, if you've kept up with my rookie silversmithing so far, you'll have covered Parts 1, 2, 3, and almost-4, and are probably wondering how I'm getting on, because I was this close *holds finger and thumb a hairs breadth apart* to getting my pendant finished.

Well...

All I had left to do was the setting of the cubic zirconia - but boy, is stone setting HARD. D'you remember this picture?

Well, that empty little circle - the bezel - is where the stone was going to sit. What I did not realise is that the outer walls had to be thinned to a 'knife edge' thickness before I could put the stone in. I was terrified of taking too much off and ending up with a portion of no wall at all, so it took me ages to get it right.

When I did, the faceted crystal sat inside, and it was then a simple case (!) of pushing the thinned walls inwards with a bezel pusher until the stone was secure, then push over the top a little bit. It takes an awful lot of strength to do this well - and I'd not helped myself (of course) by doing all of this on a domed base, because it didn't sit flat on the workbench. Lex came to my rescue to help secure the stone, (with a rather worrying moment when the domed base deformed under the pressure - eek! But she managed to reshape it again - phew.) Then I just had to finish off.

I didn't manage to stop the stone rattling, though, because it wasn't a tight enough fit... Lex said it was secure - no risk of it dropping out - so I decided to leave it as it was.

Next - burnishing. This uses a lovely smooth tool that you run round the outside edge of the bezel to smooth away any slight imperfections. From this close up, you can see my setting's not entirely smooth, but I am happy with it.

And  - ta-da! - here is the absolutely finished pendant...

There's a couple of things I would perhaps have done differently - I think I should have made the central tree trunk smoother, so there was more of a contrast between it and the textured background. Or maybe given it a satin finish... And I would have left such an ambitious project until I was a bit more familiar with all the techniques I've been learning, instead of jumping straight in with something so technically difficult!

But it is finished, I love it, and I need to find a length of thong now to hang it on.

As to my other project... remember my ring?

It was a proper circle when I soldered it (look back at part 1 if you want to see how uncircular my first pinkie ring attempt was!) and last week I added the tube setting for the sapphire cabachon. 

It sounded simple enough - cut a short length of 3.8mm tube, and solder to the ring. Except...you have to cut a longer length of tube than you think, because you of course you saw the tube in a (hopefully) straight line, which won't sit well on the curve of the ring. So there's a bit of filing involved, with a rounded file of a similar diameter to the finished ring, until the tube sits without any gaps on your ring. THEN you can solder. Which I did, successfully. (Hooray - finally getting the hang of it!)

Needs pickling - hence the matt and brown-black areas

The next step is to file the tube down until it's a depth that comes about two thirds of the way up the cabachon. I had to be careful to work from a side view here, to avoid taking off too much.

After that, I had to open out the tube by 0.2mm so the cabachon sat comfortably inside, before carefully filing the outside of the tube back to that same knife edge I'd done before. (I realised while doing this that one of the issues I had setting the pendant stone was that I hadn't reduced the thickness of the entire bezel wall - just the top part - because I misguidedly thought that as it was just the top I was pushing in towards the stone, that was the only bit which needed thinning. This time, I did the depth of the bezel, and it made the setting SO much easier.)

Anyhow, to cut a long story short - the cabachon was set, and then I started to sand and file around the shoulders of the stone to remove a few solder marks and make everything smooth and lovely. I didn't get it completely finished; I have some sanding homework to do this week so I can polish next...

See those saw marks? Need to sand them out.

And that big blob of internal solder will have to be sorted, too

Couldn't resist trying the ring on though! You can see that it needs polishing still, and I'm wearing it here on my right hand, but ultimately will wear it on my left from May onwards, because that's when Mr Squidge and I celebrate our silver wedding anniversary... 

And for the last week of my course? I have an idea for a very simple bangle bracelet which mainly involves forming and soldering, so I might just get the ring polished and a bangle made...

Diary of a Rookie Silversmith: Part Almost-4

I AM SO EXCITED!!

Not many pics, I'm afraid - forgot to take the camera to the workshop this week to take staged photos - but the pendant is almost finished!! All that's left for me to do next week is set the stone.

In fact, this week's session was really good for a number of reasons...

1. I managed to successfully solder a bail onto my pendant without having to ask Lex how to do any of it beforehand. (Yes, I'm THAT confident at soldering now. Only taken me seven weeks!)

2. Formed a ring - and it was actually round!! (Shan't tell you that I had measured it wrong though, and had to chop a fair few mm off.. It's still a little bit big)

3. I managed to tension the ring, saw the join and solder it...all in the space of about half an hour. You might remember my first pinkie ring took a total of four hours over two sessions.

4. I chose a sapphire cabachon to mount in the ring.

5. I polished the pendant and it's all silvery and shiny...

Downside...I sawed my thumb. Sod'd Law says I did it just after I thought to myself 'must move the ring a bit further up the sacrificial block in case it goes through and hits my thumb first...'

Wonder if I'll get them both finished next week?

Diary of a Rookie Silversmith: Part 3

This is going to be a short one.

I'd got as far as succesfully soldering my 'tree' onto the base disc of my pendant, and choosing a stone in Part 2, and then things stalled a bit.

In two further sessions, I've made a stone setting and soldered it to the pendant. Which doesn't sound like a lot, and isn't, really. I'm discovering that a lot of the time is taken up by waiting to ask a question (I'm not the only person there, and everyone else had questions too!), waiting to use various bits of kit (I do try to organise myself so I can get on with something else, but that's not always possible) or getting to grips with a technique.

For example...

I made the double-skinned tube setting for the stone;

Cut the sheet metal...

Cut one portion slighter narrower than the other and
file them both even (thin one for the inside)

Solder the two sheets together, form a ring, and solder again...

But - it stood really high on the pendant, so I knew it needed to be filed down. I started with rough sandpaper. Took an age. Lex saw me, and introduced me to a small vice which I could clamp the setting into, and a metal file. Lovely - potential to file a lot quicker. Except the setting kept jumping out of the vice (I was filing it in the wrong direction!) and I didn't seem to be making much headway in reducing the depth of the tube. Cue Lex again - she asked if I wanted some help. After about half an hour's filing with no real impact, I said yes please... I could see straightaway that she was removing a lot more silver than I'd managed, with just one swipe of the file - what was her secret?

It turned out to be strength - she showed me how much force she was using by pressing against my hand; it was a lot! I admit that Lex ended up filing the tube down to the right amount in the end...but I didn't mind. I was still learning by watching her, and to be honest, my frustration at my own lack of progress was beginning to impact on what I was achieving.

So I am learning as I go along - learning lots! - but it does mean that everything takes so much more time than I thought it would, and I'm having to rein in my expectations of what I can achieve in the time available to me.

I did manage to get the reduced depth stone setting soldered onto the base disc (and Lex tells me my soldering is improving - hooray!), so next week's tasks are filing the top edge of the setting so it can be bent over the stone, soldering a bale onto the back, actually setting the stone, and polishing. I might actually get it finished...?

All set to solder - spot the little blue squares inside the setting?

Back on the Wagon

For the first time in weeks - maybe months! - I'm writing again. Still working on the oldie, but beginning to get a feel for the voice of the MC, now that I know who she is.

It's been a while, and I admit to having procrastinated left, right, and centre while I've tried to work out the HUMUNGOUS plot problems I discovered re the MC's motivation.

I have procrastinated with quilting. With knitting. With facebook. With looking up vicar job descriptions (No - not me! Ours is leaving after nearly 20 years with us and as I shall be standing for one of the churchwarden posts later this year, I could be involved in the process of finding a new one). With jewellery making (Part 2 of Diary of a Rookie Silversmith will come soon - but it's taking me a LOT longer to complete the pendant I'm working on than I expected, thanks to my inability to solder properly.) I have written a short story. And I have read.

All of that's fine, but it took me away from the WIP in terms of writing time. Did it help any? Don't know really. I have had time to think about the story and the new MC, so perhaps the break did me good. But the sense of frustration in knowing that I'm NOT writing and I ought to be has been difficult to overcome. A 'can't see the woods for trees' kind of moment, where you know you need to crack on, but don't quite know where to start.

Hopefully, now I'm back on the wagon, I'll stay on it.

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!