Metal Jewellery Course: Second Project

I spent the first part of the session soldering a jump ring to my robin pendant. Here's a tip - always make sure you know exactly what your jump rings are made of before you put them in cleaning solution. Mine turned out to be (probably) steel-coated copper. The whole thing tarnished, and turned the pendant pink.

Luckily Roland had some scraps of silver wire on hand, and I was able to make my own jump ring. And solder it on the pendant again. I was still not full of the love for soldering. After it was soldered and in the pickle again, I decided to have a go at drop casting.

Did you ever play the game where you drip candle wax into water to tell fortunes? It's like that but with molten silver. I sat down with some scrap silver, a blowtorch, a bowl of water, and a pair of massive safety gauntlets, and started playing.

You don't get a great variety of shapes from this method, it turns out. Molten silver forms a ball, so a lot of the time the shapes are rounded. Sort of.


And you need to pour it quickly or you end up with things like this.

And yes, it is silver although it looks like copper. Oxides build up on the surface during heating and turn it funny colours.

Eventually I had a piece in a shape I liked, and while it was in the pickle cleaning I finished cleaning up the pendant with pumice powder, tripoli, and jeweller's rouge. It turns out that most of the work in metal jewellery goes towards the finish, and it's easy to see why pieces cost as much as they do.

At the end of the session I had a completed robin pendant, and a random silver shape. Somehow I had to find something to do with this: