New Jewellery Technique – 1st Attempt at Sterling Silver Etching

Today, I am trying a new jewellery technique and making my 1st attempt at sterling silver etching – I have some black stop-out polish and some ferric nitrate and plan to etch 2 rings today. Wish me luck!

For the rings, I am using 4mm x 0.84mm sterling silver rectangular wire. I filed the ends to make it easier to join and solder later, and I have annealed and pickled them to make it easier to work with later. I’m also thinking that it will do less damage to my etched pieces if I anneal the metal first.

A few hours later… so I have been experimenting with the etch resist most of the morning. I have spent most of the time trying to find ways of writing Chinese characters directly onto the silver – quite challenging as I don’t seem to have the right tools or the skill to write onto such a small piece of metal! I’ve tried toothpicks and makeshift paintbrushes (courtesy of my husband who has been mauling my paintbrushes to try and make something delicate enough!). My first attempt was a disaster – everything came out like a blob! Luckily, I’ve managed to get it off (with a lot of elbow grease).

I tried my second piece with some black carbon film – this seems to work better because I can apply the film directly to my piece of metal and use a scribe to write the characters. The scribe has a much finer point, so I was able to write quite small and delicately. The first couple of attempts were ok (luckily, the carbon just wipes off!), but didn’t seem to come out dark enough. So I annealed my metal again and pickled it, then cleaned it with some jewellers’ pumice to clean off all the grease marks. I used the carbon paper again, and this time it came out much darker.

I do still want to see what happens if I use the black out polish, so I have created a very basic design onto my other ring and applied with my makeshift paintbrush. So we’ll see how this compares!

I’ve mixed up the ferric nitrate in accordance with the manufacturer’s instructions (although I’ve halved the quantities), stuck my piece onto some brown tape and, per many of the websites out there, I have taped my piece with the pattern facing downwards just on the surface of the ferric nitrate. It’s been in for about 10 minutes now… so fingers crossed – I’ll be back in a couple of hours…

Three Hours Later

Three hours later, I retrieved my silver from the ferric nitrate (I had been repeatedly shaking the container to mix the ferric nitrate and excitedly peek at the results – it’s like Christmas!). After rinsing and applying bicarbonate of soda, you can see the results.

The piece where I used the stop out varnish had a nice deep etched pattern (3 hours might have been a tad too long). But the carbon paper really didn’t work out too well.

I’ve opted now to oxidize parts of the ring to give some contrast, using liver of sulphur and then given both rings a final polish. The final results were not too bad!

So my key learnings today:

– I should have started on bigger pieces. I don’t have the skill to do such delicate work. And perhaps etching doesn’t lend itself to such delicate work?
– Make sure to have the right brushes!
– Carbon paper doesn’t make a dark enough or thick enough imprint so possibly needs touching up with stop out varnish.
– If I want to write characters on my jewellery, I either need to think bigger, learn to engrave or learn to make stamps or punches!