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!
