Starting Out with My Very Own Jewellery Collection

To give myself a bit more structure, I’ve decided to start building a jewellery collection, using geometry for inspiration. I’ve actually been working on it for a little while – I travel a lot for work, so it’s the perfect time to get the sketchbook out and put some ideas on paper. Some are completely impractical (really didn’t fancy making millions of tiny sakura flowers out of silver by hand… that might be one to try once I give silver clay a go), but others are fairly simple and within my current skill levels. Now I have around 10-15 ideas on paper, I’ve decided to start trying to realise my creations. So far, it’s been a lot of fun!

Designing My First Piece

I’ve opted for one of my simplest designs:

(As you can see, I also had a go at pricing it up! I might have got a bit carried away…!)

Anyway, I’d been thinking about how to make this pendant for a while. My original thought was to get either some square or rectangular wire and then solder them into a frame. I’d set the stone would into a bezel, with a metal back plate. The bottom triangle would be a small piece of silver, soldered onto the bottom of the frame.

But, I got thinking about how complicated it might be to get the soldering right (particularly, as I’m still learning how best to solder things together). The challenge I can see with making a frame in the way I described is filing the right angles onto the three pieces of wire at each corner. I finally decided that I couldn’t quite cope with that yet – I could foresee disasters of melted solder… So I started with a sheet of silver and sawed out the pieces to make a backing plate.

Making a Start

Here’s the template I started with:

I cut the template out and stuck it to a piece of sterling silver sheet with double-sided sticky tape (something kindly taught to me by the lovely people at London Jewellery School!) and sawed it out carefully.

So, I was beginning to feel pretty pleased with myself as I hadn’t broken any saw blades… I ended up going through 3 blades on the penultimate triangle!

So, this is the basic pendant that I ended up with:

I even remembered to drill holes for the bail!

And here it is when I took my paper template off (there’s nothing like really clean silver! Although for some reason, it always makes me think of robots…)

Making the Bezel

I put the pendant to one side to start working on making a bezel for the stone.  I chose to use a black onyx oval cabochon (8x6mm), courtesy of Cookson Gold – first time I’ve worked with onyx.  I’m amazed by how shiny it is!

I‘ve had so many mis-haps making bezels in the past.  Normally, I follow step-by-step instructions that I found on YouTube – typically using a post-it note to mark out the perimeter of my stone.  Inevitably, I make a bezel that is either too small or too big.  So my mathematical brain kicked in – why not calculate the perimeter of the stone with the correct formula?? (I am a Maths graduate after all, though you may not have guessed it!) I have no idea why this didn’t occur to me before, my university tutors would be dismayed! So that’s what I did… and for the first time ever, I made a bezel that was EXACTLY the right size, first time! Whoo hoo!

So all the pieces have been made up, time to texture the pendant! I got to use the new texturing hammer my sister gave me for my birthday. Then I soldered the bezel to the back plate and polished up (which took FOREVER!)

All that was left to do is add the stone:

Overall, I’m fairly happy with my pendant.  Because I’ve sawed it out of sheet metal, it was hard to get all the little triangles to be even. I suspect I would have been better off making the frame out of silver wire. My hubby has suggested enhancing the design, using round wire. I’m looking forward to trying that next weekend! In the meantime, I’d better get started with making the chain to finish my necklace!