Making silver jewellery (part 1)
Crafts, Jewellery | 17. July 2008 |
During my time at high school I used to go to silver jewellery classes every week because I wanted to become a jeweller. I really enjoyed creating jewellery out of metal, wires, beads and everything else I could find. After finishing high school and choosing another career path I pretty much stoped doing anything like it.
A few months ago I realised how much I actually miss working with precious metal and I enrolled into two silver jewellery workshops with Barbara Ryman. The first one is a pendant and earring workshop, the second one will be a ring workshop.
Before we started working on a proper piece we did some simple sawing practise on a piece of gilding metal just to get the hang of sawing straight, curves and zigzag.
After that I decided to work on a simple pendant which I drew onto the metal with a permanent marker. Nothing complicated, just a simple shape with a few holes in it.
First I drilled little holes into the inside areas I wanted to remove. I slipped the sawing blade through the hole, tighten the saw and cut out the holes from the inside.
After that I cut around the outside. With various sizes of files I removed all the wobbly sawing bits and straighten the edges before I polished the surfaces of the metal with various grains of sandpaper.
With a range of pliers I bend the top bit of the pendent to a loop and polished it some more before I could hang the finished pendent on my keyring. I was very happy with the result.
For my second piece I decided to work on a pair of earring. I wanted to use some of the metal I etched in earlier workshop with Barbara.
Out of the etched silver I cut circles, about coin size and I cut some smaller circles out of the gilding metal. I had to be very careful when I polished the silver disk. I didn’t want the lovely pattern to disappear so I only polished them lightly. The gilding metal disk I could work harder and I polished them till they were nice and shiny.
I wanted the disks to hang on an oversize ear hook which I first had to design. To not waste any precious metal I first bent a hook out of some copper wire. Once I was happy with the size and the shape of the hook I straightened the wire and measured the silver wire.
One end of the silver wire I bent into a tiny loop which got to sit behind the disks, invisible. I placed first a larger silver disk and then a smaller gilding metal disk onto the wire before I bent the wire into a hook.
I really like my earrings and I’m already looking forward to next week’s ring workshop.
