Jewellery workshop - silver soldering

 

Fiona and I were very fortunate to do another very personalised workshop with jeweller Lindsay Gallagher - see Lindsay's FB here. 

Fiona has done a blog on the workshop here.

My goal for the workshop was to see if it was possible to inlay silver wire into pre cut grooves in smaller stones from the cove - see photo below. Stones were cut freehand with the diamond blade in the side grinder.

As you can see from the opening photo the outcome was quite good - I had tested three ways of soldering the wire as the top and attaching or creating a jump ring.

Following are a few progress photos of my three pendants. The wire on the oblong stone was quite thick and hard to twist into shape.

Fiona had a lot of fun learning to form and cut circles ; and created a couple of gorgeous pieces - see photos below.

I also used the workshop to test if I could insert a silver rod into a pre-grooved bigger stone - as you can see below the answer is yes. Quite a bit of hammering and filing the bottom edge was involved.

A final photo of the three pendants before I applied a bit of oil to the stones to bring the colour out.

Big thanks to Lindsay for a professional, fun and creative workshop. Fiona found the oblong stone at the cove - so she now owns the finished piece which just needs a cord.