I have a lot of friends who love crafts – all kinds of crafts, from knitting and needlework through to pottery and wood burning. They’re a talented bunch, and we love nothing better than to share our latest creations with each other. At the moment, we’re all just waiting for social distancing restrictions to ease …
After months and months, I have finally finished my turquoise necklace! It wasn’t exactly how I wanted it – I had wanted to add two silver swirls to the chain, and also use the Spanish style chain. But… I discovered that the Spanish style chain is really hard to do! It needs a lot of …
After a short hiatus from jewellery making, I finished the twins’ birthday pendants over the weekend (only a month late!). Filing the edges smooth in all the little gaps took a long time, but completely worth it! Check them out, pre-finished:
I added the bails (pre-bought from Cookson Gold) – sounds silly, but it didn’t occur to me that there were different sized pins on pinch bails. These bails were originally too long for my 1mm thick silver pendants. I found it was easily fixed, simply by cutting with flush cutters to get a perfect fit! All-in-all, I’m fairly pleased with the outcome – the two pendants look reasonably similar given that a) they are handmade and b) I am a complete beginner!
I took quite a long time finishing these off as I wanted a high-polish shine. For now, I have temporarily abandoned my Dremel, after making a bit of a mess with my sister’s ring. I will need to do some more reading on how to finish jewellery. In any case, I hand-finished with three grades of sand paper (150, 180 and 1200) – I have to admit, I think the 150 is a bit too coarse for what I’m doing.
I then took a burnisher to each of the pendants to get a really high shine. I’m not 100% with the finish, because I can still see marks and the shine doesn’t seem to be even – but it’s as good as I’m going to get for now, I think. I might invest in a barrelling machine to see if that helps with the finish.
So here they are, the final necklaces:
And here is what they look like on:
I’ve sent pictures to the in-laws, and they seem pretty pleased. I’ll have to wait and see what the twins think!
I made my first visit to the Goldsmith’s Fair yesterday, and loved it so much I went again today! What can I say, other than “wow”! Firstly, I have never seen so much hand-made, quality jewellery under one roof before! And secondly, the whole event was just really inspiring – could I be here in …
Since I started on my jewellery making quest, I have been asking myself the question “just who would buy my jewellery?”. And it’s a really hard question for me to answer. I’ve read that I should be making jewellery that I like. Sounds simple. The problem is that I like (and sometimes love!) a lot …
Today, I’m experimenting with how to make a pendant. I’ve never done this before, so I’m doing a practice run with a piece of copper, rather than straight into silver. Copper is significantly less expensive and harder than silver. For these reasons, many books and websites suggest mastering copper before moving onto silver. First Attempt …
