Saw piercing and inlaying metal in stones

It was grand to get time in the Wee Workshop (aka garden shed) today so I could experiment with jewellery saw piercing on a few pendants. Piercing is a fiddly technique where you cut the design into the metal using a very fine saw blade and a starter hole in the piece of metal. In my case I intend to use recycled silver that I have melted, formed in moulds and flattened by putting it through a hand operated roller mill. 

The opening photo is a close up of one of the pieces from today - a dandelion seed head on a stem that grew out of a piece of stoney soil. I was using the hole and organic formed edges of the metal created in the rolling process. I have yet to drill a hole for a jump ring and give the pendant a good clean and polish. The pendant is about 50mm long and 20mm wide - 1mm thick metal

Some process photos follow. The sawing is time consuming as one has to be careful of breaking fine blades.

I had time to use a diamond blade in the angle grinder to cut grooves in two small pebble from the cove. I have glued solid brass rod into the grooves. Both pebbles will require sand and then oiling to bring out the colour. Final photo is oft two pebbles and two pendants in the rough.

An enjoyable day in the Wee Workshop out of the cold and breeze.

Happy but weary

 

Fiona and I held a salvaged silver-plate metal jewellery workshop today in Armadale Village Hall. It was limited to 8 people but we had 9 including a younger girl. The opening photo of me, by Fiona, shows me introducing the day, goals and an introduction to processes, designs and tools.

We set the hall up yesterday afternoon for a midmorning start today. Photos of the setup follow.

As you can see from the couple of photos following participants were very engaged and productive. All participant made 4 or more pieces.

It was a grand and successful day. I could not have done it without Fiona's assistance - she knows so much about the tools and processes - it meant we could give participant individual attention. As I said in the title were are very happy with the outcome but we are also weary - hence the brevity of this blog post.

A tale of two batches of metal

 

In the future I hope to start a new line of jewellery using salvaged silver that has been melted and rolled into strips about 1-1.2mm thick.

Whilst giving Fiona a bit of a hand with a couple of her experiments I decided to melt a second batch of silver objects I had been gifted - earrings, bangle, chain etc. I was melting the metal in my electric furnace. I set the temperature at 930 degrees to see if the metal would melt at that point. See below  very hot furnace with molten metal in the graphite crucible.

I poured the metal into the metal form you can see sitting on top of the furnace to warm it up. It poured well. But when It came to cutting the metal it simple shattered as you can see from the opening photo. And when Fiona tried to put a piece through the metal roller it just turned into particles as you can see in the photo below.

I have no idea why the metal just turned to a crystaline form. It has happened to me a couple of times in the past. All I can think is that some of the silver metal objects gifted to me must have had impurities that causes the metal to change character when mixed with other salvaged metal.

Fortunately I had done a silver metal melt earlier and when I cut that metal into strips it rolled well - quite hard but able to be used in the future work. Some annealing and rolled metal photos follow. The metal strips when rolled went from 50mm to over 100mm.

It just reinforces that using salvaged metal is always a bit of a lotto as one can never be guaranteed of the quality of the material. 

I re-melted the shattered metal and turned it into stars!!!! See below - a lot of colourful impurities!!!

Testing tools and making examples

 

Preparation for my Simple Stylish Jewellery Workshop in Scotland in August is proceeding. We will be using salvaged silver-plated brass. Having done a plan and a design options sheet, I am now testing basic hand tools I can take with me on the next trip and making some examples based on the design options sheet and with the hand tools.

The opening and following photos shows the examples I made today

As the following photo shows I have cut most of the metal for the workshop. 

I'm testing a wooden dapping tool, metal punch pliers, a micro eyelet setting tool, diamond file for make the flower form and a vintage jeweller's  hand held vice - see photos below.

Over the weekend I hope to complete and assemble the examples including putting the pendants on necklaces and the earrings on earwigs.

Repurposing salvaged objects

 

Many moons ago I had removed the bowl sections off a few vintage champagne coupes - yes there are such things - certainly a thing in days gone by. They were wider and shallower goblets!!

Anyway I digress. I thought if hammered the bowls to create a deeper shape and planish the back surface, the coupe sections would make good deep ladle bowl sections.

As you can see from the opening photo I have made three deeper ladles. These can be used for ladling hot soup, or stews or ladling jams or sauces into jars - very versatile!!! The handles are a bit longer than usual so one can keep one's hands away from hot or boiling liquids.

A few of the process photos follow: forming handles, formed bowls before planishing, the planishing process and back and front of the bowls after planishing and polishing.

A few more images of the finished ladles. I have used 2mm thick copper rivets on these ladles - cut down copper nails.

These ladles have been put into my online shop under the Culinary Metal category 

Mindful Metal books

 

I tend to categorise the above small silver-plated metal books in both my Mindful Metal and Artists' Books online shop categories because they have both function and form.

From a function perspective, because each small book (about 4.5cm high, 3.7cm wide and 2.5cm across page opening) has a word stamped on the centre page, each is meant to encourage contemplation on or holding onto that word of the action it invokes. Each book could be used as part of meditation; or sit beside one's bed or computer to encourage a gentle focus on the word. Because each book is unique and hand made from silver-plate from salvaged placemats I also see then as small 3D artists' books - small sculptural pieces.

A few process photos follow. I usually tape the three book leaves together to hold them firm when I drill and rivet the book leaves together.

A couple more photos of four of the completed books follow.

At least one of each of the books (shine, love, hope and dream) can be found in my online shop.