Metals projects- Rings and Pendants

We finally had some beauiful sunshine here in Dallas! Perfect opportunity to take some photos of our most recent completed projects in our Metals Class. These projects allowed us to utilize alot of soldering techniques and getting comfortable with using a saw. The bottom pictures feature our layered textured silver pendants. We milled a texture into the bottom layer of silver using a fabric similar to a linen. The texture is amazing! I love it! The middle picture features Bezel set Cabochon Pendants. These were tedious but fun. There were many steps involved in learning to bezel set a stone. Each piece starts with a thin strip of fine silver which is soldered to fit the stone. A piece of silver is then cut to encase the stone in the back with a saw. This can take a little bit of time and patience and a few sawblades! These pieces are then soldered together and then the filing and sanding begins... We then set the stone and bezel it in place and finish with some polishing on the tripoli buffer. A similar process was used in the above rings with the addition of soldering a sized band. I chose to mill a strip of silver with rice paper as a band featured in the top left. Matt chose to use wire and go for the double band. I think they both turned out amazing... This week we will be working on finishing up several reticulated silver cuff bracelets. I hope to be posting a couple for purchase in the future. Today my steel bench block arrived!  I have had the hammer ready to go and now I am so excited to start incorporating some hammered textures into my jewelry. I never thought that I would be so excited about tools :)

 

 Hammered 14kt filled gold hammered hoops with Labradorite faceted drops