My mum’s birthday is coming up and even though she doesn’t wear jewellery, I don’t want her to feel left out. So I’ve decided to make her a special silver brooch. I’ve opted for a fairly simple design, featuring a small round turquoise cabochon (ordered from Bellore) in a shamrock. I would have made a seahorse (which is my mum’s favourite animal), except 1) I can’t draw seahorses and 2) I haven’t managed to figure out how to get some texture on and give it a more 3-dimensional look. So mum will have to make do with a shamrock this year (which isn’t entirely random… she lived in Ireland for a lot of her childhood!)
The Method to My Madness
I started with a cardboard template of a shamrock (first couple of attempts, I ended up with a poppy… D’oh!). I attached the template to a sheet of 1.5mm thick sterling silver sheet, with some double-sided sticky tape. I sawed out the shape with a jeweller’s saw (only breaking one blade in the process! Whoo-hoo!)
This is what I ended up with:
After some filing to give the piece some shape and smooth out the edges, I was left with this:
To make the piece a little more interesting, I added some texture with a hammer (very noisy in my house today!)
Next I made the brooch pint. I found a very good tutorial on the Cookson Gold forums:
I won’t go into the step by step, as the tutorial already does that, but I’ve added some pictures. I used a 1.3mm round sterling silver wire, and had to make 2 attempts at making the brooch pin as the first time I ended up with a pin that was much too short! This was the first attempt where the pin ended up too short:
And here is the final pin!
Next I made the bezel and fitted it to the brooch. I’m still in two minds over whether I should have attached the bezel before I made the pin. I think I’ve done it the right way around – my fear was that if I attached the bezel first, it might melt when I attached the brooch pin.
Then I added a bezel (managed to make the bezel the right size, first time round! Yay!)
All that was left to do was to add the stone and give the piece a good finish. Et voila!
I hope my mum likes it! Happy Birthday, Mum!
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