A Special Request for Birthday Pendants (Part 1)

Today, I’m starting a special project. My Father-in-Law has asked me to make two birthday pendants for his nieces’ 21st birthday present – they’re twins (in case, you’re wondering). First thing’s first, I need to choose the best design! My Father-in-Law is a massive Leonard Cohen fan. So he asked me to make two pendants based on Leonard Cohen’s two fused hearts design. I ended up basing the design on the album cover for “Dear Heather”.

Designing a Pendant

Here were my initial designs:

I had a lot of ideas and various designs. Some used piercing techniques, others etching and still others involved soldering wire. I eventually settled on making two similar pendants (they are twins after all! But I can’t guarantee that the quality of my pieces will be the same!). I chose the design in the top left, using piercing and etching for the final detail.

Making a Start

To make sure that the hearts are the same size, I cut a template out of cardboard and then drew the design onto a sheet of paper:

I stuck the template onto the silver sheet (1.5mm) with double-sided sticky tape… and then the fun began with sawing out the disk and each of the inner sections!

A Few Hours Later… 

Several hours later, I ended up with the beginnings of my pendant:

Etching

Now I need to create the illusion that the two hearts are intertwined.  I’ve opted to etch the details in.  So I started by painting the whole piece with some stop-out varnish as the resist and left it to dry.  Then I used a scribe to scratch off the resist where I wanted the piece to be etched:

I decided I didn’t need too deep an etch, so I left the piece in the ferric nitrate for 1.5 hours.  After stopping the etch reaction with bicarbonate of soda, and cleaning off the varnish with nail varnish remover (and 7 saw blades and 2 drill bits later!), I was left with this:

I’m pretty pleased with the result. I got a lot (and I mean, a lot!) of sawing practice. It’s only half-finished at this point – I still need to file all the rough edges, add a bail and give the whole piece a good polish and finish (and make a second one for the other twin!), but you get the idea!