I admit that I have been very, very quiet over the past couple of months, and for that I can only sincerely apologise. I have no excuse other than it was really difficult to find any time for myself whilst my children were off school! But, September has rolled around and my children are back …
Sunday evening and the kids are in bed (phew!). It’s been a funny Sunday. You know that feeling when you’ve hit the end of the week and you know Monday is just around the corner, but you really can’t motivate yourself to do anything? Yes? No? Maybe just me! Anyway, I got to around 2pm, …
Wow, I’ve just looked at the last time I wrote in my blog, and around 18 months. I only really have one excuse – I was busy having a baby. It’s amazing how much time these little ones take up! But I haven’t been completely quiet on the jewellery front. In particular, I decided to do …
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!
Having played about for a few weeks with experimenting in my lovely new workshop, I’ve discovered the existence of hallmarking! Quite honestly, as a newbie to jewellery making, I had no idea that silver (and gold) jewellery needs to be hallmarked as proof of quality of the metal. In the UK, items made of sterling …
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 …
