Experimenting with Mokume Gane – A First (Disastrous!) Attempt

Well… it’s the first day that I’ve been home since the Christmas holidays. I’m feeling very excited and raring to go! I’ve spent some time designing a 12 piece collection and pricing up the items, mainly out of curiosity. I’m not sure whether I’m capable of making all the pieces, as I let my imagination go wild! Also, when I priced them up, I was a bit shocked how much they would cost in terms of raw materials (let alone labour costs!). So I think I need to try to cut the cost down a bit. So, I thought I’d experiment with Mokume Gane to try and mix cheaper base metals with silver.

Mokume gane is a Japanese technique that I’ve been wanting to try ever since I saw some beautiful pieces at the Goldsmiths Fair in September. It’s a metalworking technique which mixes metals together into beautiful patterns and  results in a stunning piece of sheet metal. Have a look at Craig Stewart’s work for some stunning examples!

Getting Stuck In

So I decided to have a go with a small piece of copper and a small piece of silver.

The silver is only 0.3mm thick, whereas the copper is 1.5mm thick. I got the silver really cheap at Cookson Gold, as it was an off cut. This works well for me, since I never really have any specific projects in mind. That said, I’m not sure I would buy such a thin piece of silver again, unless I needed it for a special reason. It seems quite difficult to work with. For example, sawing it wasn’t a great idea, as it really was too flimsy to cope with the saw. I think using the snips would have worked better, although I’m not sure whether the silver would have been warped at the edge?  Maybe I’ll try that with the leftovers.

So, I’m following the mokume gane techniques described by Anastasia Young in her book “The Workbench Guide to Jewelry Techniques”, which was a birthday present from my flatmate:

I added a bevel to one of the two shorter edges on each of the copper and silver sheets using a flat file.  Then, I attempted to solder the two pieces together. The book says to use stick solder, but I didn’t know how to do that. So I attempted to bind the two pieces together with iron binding wire and placed pallions of solder on the edges. Don’t ever try it yourself! It is the most frustrating thing I have ever tried to do!

Two Hours Later…

After two hours of unsuccessful attempts to solder the two pieces of metal, I finally gave up feeling very dejected and frustrated! After calming down a bit, I went back to the book and had a look at how to stick solder the pieces together. These were the mistakes that I made:

1. One of the sheets of metal should have been smaller/shorter than the other. The longer piece only should have been bevelled. Then, the edge of the shorter piece should have been lined up with the bevelled edge.
2. I should have used my reverse tweezers, with an insulated handle, to hold the hard solder. Then apply heat to the metal sheets, before adding the solder. I guess this would have saved me from making millions of little solder balls…
3. I don’t think I had enough gas in my torch, so it really wasn’t getting hot enough.

So armed with this new knowledge, I’m ready to try again next week… I think it’s worth getting this technique right before I start on my collection, as I’d like to add the extra dimension of colour into my designs.  Right, keep your fingers crossed for me!