All That Glitters Challenge – Making a Cuff Part I

Can you believe that next week is the final of “All That Glitters“? The last six weeks have just flown by! This post is Part I in a 2-part series about my Hawaiian Honeymoon cuff… read more to find out why it’s in 2 parts!

Week 5 was very exciting as it was the first time the jewellers had the opportunity to work with precious and semi-precious stones! It really added an extra dynamic to their creativity and design – for one, there was just so much variety and colour! This week, we were down to the final four jewellers, who were tasked with making a cuff using at least five gemstones that would appeal to the masses, in just five hours! This was followed up with making a replacement engagement ring for a couple, who’d had their first ring stolen. It was an interesting and heart string tugging moment of the show – a good reminder of why jewellery holds such meaning for the individual.

I didn’t dare try to make an engagement ring (a project for the future!). But, I very much wanted to make a cuff… after having a couple of good soldering days, I was feeling confident. Little did I know… Yes, this week, I have failed to complete my project, but all is not lost. I have learnt a huge amount (more than if it had gone right the first time), which I’m really happy to share with you all! So, here is Part I of my All That Glitters Challenge! Part II will follow soon!

This Week’s All That Glitters Challenge

For my cuff, I had a lot of ideas and had some trouble narrowing it down. The nice problem with a cuff is that it’s so much bigger than your average ring or pendant. So you can fit quite a lot on it and I really let myself go wild on design (it didn’t occur to me that I’ve only ever set one stone at a time before…).

Final Design

I finally took inspiration from my favourite necklace, which my husband bought for me during our honeymoon in Hawaii (hence, the name!)

I raided my cabochon stash (I actually have a cabochon stash now!), and found these beauties!

The one on the left is a Lapis Lazuli. However, I’ve no idea what the ones on the right are! I got them in a bargain box of cabochons recently, and still have not managed to identify them. If you have some ideas, please share with me in the comments! I’d really like to know what they are!

For my cuff, I decided to use a bit of left over metal from the Queen Amidala bib necklace, which I made a few weeks ago. Yes, I was very pleased with myself that I didn’t need to cut another piece of extremely large copper, and that this piece wasn’t going to waste! Here’s the concept for my Hawaiian honeymoon cuff. It’s making me a bit nostalgic…

It Really Wasn’t as Easy as I Thought It Would Be

As I write this, I’m 2 days into making this cuff. I really thought I’d be done by now. I mean, it looks simple enough…

Day 1

In reality, I started this project a little later than I normally would have done, as I was working on my first commission (hurray!). Unfortunately, the commission took me longer than I envisaged (I really must take into account the fact that I’m not very efficient and need to remake everything…). Anyhow, I suppose if I’d had one more day before the next episode, I likely would have finished. But no matter, it was a valuable lesson for me…

On Day 1, I started with making the bezels. I bought some copper bezel wire so that the whole piece would look uniform. I’ve never used copper to make bezels before… I thought, how hard can it be?!

On the whole, the process is exactly the same as making a bezel in fine silver. I bought the copper bezel wire from Cookson Gold, and stupidly assumed it would be the same thickness and malleability as fine silver bezel wire. It was not the case!

The copper bezel wire came in a thickness of 1mm… my fine silver bezel wire comes in a thickness of 0.3mm. Doubts started creeping in at this point… Should I roll the wire through the rolling mill to thin it out? Would I even be able to roll the edges over the stone with a metal so thick? Should I…? Would I…?

Anyway, I decided to press on with it. I actually tried to make the bezels in a few different ways.

For the Lapis Lazuli, I calculated the length needed to wrap the oval, using a formula. Then I dallied over whether to add an extra 1mm to allow for the thickness of the metal. I didn’t do this (and yes, I should have done). The bezel came out too small, and my oval bezel mandrel was not big enough to let me stretch it fully. And I was stumped on what I could use instead. I had another go at it, this time wrapping the bezel wire directly around the stone and then sawing through the two joining pieces of wire. It was a better fit, but not perfect.

For the smaller round stones, I attempted to try and wrap the bezel wire directly around the stones. It proved quite fiddly due to the size of the stones. I ended up with a bezel that was quite a bit too big. After that I went back to the calculated size for the bezel wire and added 1mm to account for the thickness of the wire. With a bit of stretching on the mandrel, I got five very well fitting bezels. Have a look:

So, that was Day 1… so far so good!

Day 2

On Day 2, I started working on the cuff itself. I glued on the waves (thank goodness for templates from the Brother Scan N Cut!), drilled the holes (too close to the edge in some cases) and started sawing out the wave shapes. Next time I do this, I will draw the waves onto the cuff itself. The problem with trying to glue it on is that once you start sawing, it’s really difficult to see the edge of the waves. So my waves came out different sizes, but I’m pleased to report I only broke one saw blade in the process!

A little tip for you, if you’re trying this yourself… Less is more! Cut to almost the edge, then stop. You can refine with a file, but you can’t put back metal if you cut too much out… as I’ve now learnt the hard way. Impatience is not my friend.

I think it’s got a Hawaii vibe going on!

Next, I annealed the metal, then shaped it around my oval bangle mandrel. I’m going to need to refine that process, too, as I found I have no way to hold on to the mandrel properly (you can see how I fudged it on my video!).

Once I had a good shape, I set about trying to solder the bezels on. And that’s when it all quite literally went to pieces!

Soldering the Bezels

Where to start on this?!

For my first (semi-confidence) attempt, I tried placing all the bezels onto the cuff, placing pallions of medium solder around all the joins and joining them all simultaneously. Yes, maybe a little crazy. Needless to say, when I picked it up, none of the solder had melted and all the bezels fell off!

I repeated the process. With the same effect.

So, I decided to solder the large bezel on by itself with medium solder. It was semi successful. The bezel soldered on and stayed on, but I could see a gap where the solder would not run. So, I pickled it, cleaned it, added more solder and tried again. No joy.

At this point, knowing that I was trying to finish everything on the same day and still needed to put the stones in, set them and then polish everything, I decided to just press ahead and solder on the small bezels. With easy solder. All five at once. Yeah, that didn’t work.

I tried it again, and got 2 to solder on.

Then I switched to trying to solder on one bezel at a time. And 6 hours later, I still had only managed to solder on 4 out of the 6 bezels. And I wasn’t happy with any of them! Here’s the cuff at the end of Day 2:

Learnings

I probably say this every week, but I learnt a lot this week, and not only about making jewellery. The most important lesson I learnt for me is to cut myself some slack. I realised that over the past few weeks, I have been putting an increasing amount of pressure on myself to deliver a beautiful finished product, every week before the next episode, without fail. After 6 hours of failing to solder on the bezels to anywhere near what I could consider an acceptable standard, I was frustrated and in tears.

Then I realised (with help from my husband. Where would I be without him?), that actually, I was imposing these high standards and deadlines on myself. No-one else was putting those timeframes on me. And in all honesty, I don’t make jewellery for a living. I’ve had no training. I’m feeling my way and figuring it out as I go along. So, I decided to post up the half finished cuff, as a reminder to myself and others, that it’s ok to get it wrong, and it’s ok if it’s not perfect. The important thing is to persevere!

It was actually a timely reminder, as my 8 year old daughter was almost in tears this morning over her spellings. Each week, she’s given 10 spellings to learn. We start the process on Monday and get her to write out all 10 spellings to the best of her ability. Then she re-writes all the ones she gets wrong. We repeat the next day. Usually, she’s fine and she shows an improvement. This week, she got 5 out of 10 on Monday, and this morning, she got 6 out of 10. So, she was feeling a bit frustrated, too.

Well, I got the battered and bedraggled cuff out. And I showed it to her, and explained how many times I’d tried to solder the bezels on. Then told her that with practice, I’d get there, and that with practice, she’d manage to learn her spellings. I got a smile out of her, in the end!

My Final Word

Last night, frustrated and annoyed with myself, I took to Reddit to seek advice on how to solder on the bezels. I had half an idea what was going wrong, but wanted to get some thoughts from others. The Reddit community is fantastic (I’ve only just discovered it myself), but within a couple of hours, I’d had lots of hints and tips on how to get this piece done.

I woke up this morning feeling much happier, and with a plan on how to finish up this cuff. For starters, I’m going to remake the bezels so that the wire is thinner and the way that I want it. Then I’m going to get the existing bezels off the cuff. So wish me luck, I’ll be back soon with the updated and (hopefully) finished piece!

Don’t miss out on my updated cuff, hit the bell on my YouTube channel!

Part II now available here!