The Beginning of a Love for Jewellery Making

My love for jewellery making started a couple of months ago when I attended a beginners’ silversmithing class at the London Jewellery School (http://www.LondonJewellerySchool.co.uk), based in Hatton Garden.  This was a great, one day class, which introduced a lot of basic silversmithing skills and the beginning of a love for jewellery making.

I attended the class with another 7-8 women, which was a really good size as it meant that we could talk to Karen, our teacher, on an almost one-to-one basis and there was a workbench per person. The class was focused on making a simple silver ring, complete with texturing, as Karen explained that this would allow us to use a wider range of skills.

Measuring & Cutting

After some health and safety, Karen gave us an overview of the different types of sterling silver wire (who knew there were so many different shapes and sizes to choose from?!). I chose a 1.5mm x 1.3mm rectangular sterling silver wire and opted to use the rolling mill to press a pattern into my metal. I measured my finger and calculated the right length of wire for my ring (take a look at my post: Steps to Measure a Simple Band Ring for instructions on how to do this!).

Wire cut, I set about annealing and pickling the silver.  Annealing consisted of heating up the silver with a butane torch (exciting stuff for a newbie!), then quenching in cold water and placing in the pickle.  The pickle is used to clean the silver, removing any impurities from the surface.

Texturing

Metal nice and clean, I found a textured brass stencil with a leafy pattern and placed it texture side down onto my wire. After much fiddling, I managed to set the rolling mill rolls to just the right distance apart – so that it was just wide enough to let the two metals through. The result? A deep imprint in the ring band! Cool!

Get Those Ends Flat and Flush!

Filing the ends of the wire so that they were nice and flat and smooth was an important and challenging step (I have since learned not to underestimate the importance of this!).  Then I set off to anneal and pickle the wire again – if you don’t anneal and pickle the wire after each period of working with the silver, it gets work hardened and could crack (I haven’t witnessed this yet, thankfully!).  Then I bent the the wire into a (sort of) round shape and jiggled around until the two ends sat neatly against each other.  Possibly jiggling isn’t the technical term…

The two ends happily sitting next to each other, I fluxed the wire and soldered the ends together with hard solder (there are three main types of solder – hard, medium and easy.  Each type has a respectively lower melting point, which comes in handy when you make pieces with many joins).

Shaping

So, now I had a joined up band – nearly there! The band got placed on a ring mandrel and hammered with a rawhide mallet (so as not to mark the metal) until I got a nice round ring! Almost perfect!

Finishing & Polishing

The last steps were to finish and polish the ring – this is done with emery paper, working your way down from the roughest to the smoothest.  This took the longest of all the various tasks in making my ring.  I finally opted to darken the patterns, using liver of sulphur to oxidise the metal.  Some more vigorous rubbing with the emery paper, and the liver of sulphur was removed from the raised parts for the ring.  Leaving me with a finished product to be proud of!

All in all, the beginners’ class was great to get me started and I learnt a lot! I strongly recommend London Jewellery School if you are interested in trying out silversmithing.

So, that was just the beginning of my foray into jewellery making… join me as I share the little tips and insights that I gain each day.