Saturday, September 27, 2014

Repurposed Copper

I've been a bit swept away by upcycling lately.




My bench is absolutely littered with copper scraps at the moment, because of all the other projects I've been working on. It's been nice to have a little time just to bang out something beautiful.

I oxidised the chain for these, just to match the upcycled, vintage look.

As always, these necklaces are available on Etsy. Check it out!

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Stacking Rings: Basic Ring


So, this is a quick overview of the tools I use to create my jewellery. I'll show them in more detail throughout the process.


The easiest rings are created using wire. There's a huge variety of sterling silver wires available, you just have to pick the one you like the best.


To figure out how long of a piece of wire you need to make your ring, you have to do some math!

My wire is 1.4mm thick, and the ring size I want to make has a diameter of 17.2mm. I put this into an easy formula:

(wire thickness + diameter of ring size) x 3.14
(1.4mm+17.2mm) x 3.14
58.4mm


Boom!

Now, I use a hand file and my mitered square to make sure both sides of this wire are a perfect 90 degrees. Soldering silver requires that you have a good contact surface.

Once that's done, I bend my ring into shape. Soldering shape, that is. It looks like a D!


I know it doesn't look like a ring at this point. This shape ensures that the solder joint has maximum contact for soldering. I'll bang it into shape once the solder joint is done.

Soldering takes practice, so I'm not going to go into too much detail here. You select your solder (easy, medium, or hard), paint flux on the joint, torch it until the solder flows, and then throw it in pickle to remove the nasty crud. You can see pictures of the materials I use in these steps here:

Once the soldering is done, you can bash it into shape.


Once you've got your ring into a beautiful round shape, you need to give it a beautiful finish. I love using radial disks on my flexshaft:


Each of these coloured radial disks is a different grit. You go from the roughest grit to the smoothest. These radial disks give me a great finish, and I love using them. They are a bit expensive, but I find them worth every penny.

This is what your stacking ring will now look like:



Perfect huh? You can wear this ring as is, or you can add a stone or other decoration to it. I'll show you how to do that next time!

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Stacking rings


I've been having a ton of fun with these simple stacking rings lately. I'll hopefully post a tutorial soon (I just finished taking the pictures for it!)

You can find these stacking rings available in my Etsy Shop

Friday, September 27, 2013

Weddings are coming

Just a very quick update on what I'm doing at the moment:


The first wedding ring in a his/her set. It's comfort fit, which means the inside of the ring is curved to feel more comfortable on the fingers. I've spent... About an hour cleaning up this casting, and I've taken it to a pre-polish.

I'll tackle the actual polishing tomorrow.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Carnelian

Just another quick project to get off my bench:


This idea has been percolating for quite some time, and I actually wanted to do a cuttlefish casting for the top. Lacking space and cuttlefish, I settled for a hammered half circle.

Spent a rainy afternoon polishing my hammers (the finish on your hammers will transfer to your metal!) and banged these out in about an hour.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Fiber and Metal

This has been kicking around my bench for... well.. actually... about a year now.


I found these awesome felt balls at That Bead Lady, and I had to have them because they were a mixed lot of really fantastic fall colours... My favorite!

I assembled the frame by myself using nickel silver (filing angles is still hard for me), and I used a sterling silver pin from Stones and Findings. I'm quite liking the idea of combining materials, mostly thanks to my Mom. I'm probably going to hang it on a sterling box chain.

Most of my work lately has been stringing.. so I'll hopefully get some pictures of that uploaded soon.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Off-Kilter

I've been a tad behind on my jewellery work lately. I'm up with my parents at Many-Hues, so that's putting a bit of a dent in my jewellery time.


This is my latest Etsy listing. It's a quick, lightweight necklace that I love wearing at the office. I tried it out as a reminder to myself that I don't have to make everything symmetrical! Jewellery is allowed to be off-kilter, and I'll have more fun making it.

The next piece I'd like to make is a modification again, I'll be adding a setting to a pre-existing component. Can't wait to get home to work on it!

Till then though, check out what we're doing on the land here!

This necklace can be purchased on Etsy