Briarwood & Ivory

Here are earrings I created using a stencil that was too large for the actual pieces of copper. The base coat transparent Ivory put directly onto the copper. Above it I layered Briarwood for the stencil which ended up being a fairly "hard" colour. I had to do two coats for each piece, being careful to line up the stencil between layers. Then I fired both earrings together side by side to try and get an even distribution of heat. Even so the left earring turned out well but the right earring was about 2-3 seconds underfired so it didn't turn out as smooth as the other. How finicky!

Briarwood & Ivory earrings

 Next I worked on a pendant to go with the earrings. I used sections of the same stencil from the earrings to cover different areas of the pendant and am working through the second coat before putting it through a final firing.

Matching pendant

Copper Bowl I: Sinking Technique

In this Silversmith course we are working exclusively with copper (go figure). At George Brown silversmithing refers to the techniques used in creating larger pieces of silver items such as plates, bowls, spoons, tea sets, etc. These techniques involve primarily different ways of hammering the metal to form it into your chosen design. The types of jewellery formed by this silversmith method are very different from what I had created in my "Silversmith" classes at The Devil's Workshop. I'd actually equate those techniques with George Brown's goldsmithing classes (where so far we are working with brass and silver!). Anyway terminology aside here are some of the projects from my Silversmith course at George Brown.

Creating the initial bowl shape out of a copper disk

In our first project we created a bowl out of a sheet of copper by purely hammering techniques. The method of sinking stretches out the metal and thin the walls. I started by drawing concentric circles on the copper plate and hammering the bowl over a small concave groove (much smaller in diameter than the bowl) to slowly bring up the sides of the bowl. In between hammering I had to frequently anneal the copper because it hardened with every blow.

Checking the shape against my template

  After achieving the general shape I created a template of the bowl by tracing out half of the circumference at the mouth and used that to guide how deep the bowl would become. The goal was to create a hemisphere. In the second week I worked from the outside of the bowl (you can see the grid marks I drew in the photo below) and used a hammer to shape the bowl against a convex stake. This technique finishes both the inside and outside surfaces of the bowl simultaneously while shaping the bowl to the template.

Almost there, I'd say

The bowl will be marked against it's template to see how close it is to a perfect hemisphere. After marking we will be free to change the design of the bowl by cutting an interesting edge out of the top, hammering designs into the walls of the bowl, or creating feet at the bottom for the bowl to stand on. There were some pretty cool designs on display in the classroom so I'll take a closer look next time.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

I learned how to make my first rubber mold in class which more or less followed the process described here. There were a few slight differences; The silicon rubber I used was heated to 305degF for 49 minutes (seven minutes per layer), and instead of using a mold cutting frame I just had the scalpel and hook. We were also taught to cut the two halves apart with an uneven edge to ensure a better fit when the two halves were put back together - sort of like keying the two sides.

 The best part about the rubber mold is that it picked up the thin jump rings I soldered on which hopefully means for my next swan pendant casting I won't have to solder new ones.  It had been tricky soldering the jump rings to the pendant without melting them since the pendant has so much more thermal mass and took longer to heat up.

Last night I also soldered a thin piece of wire into a tiny hole in the pendant that was drilled with a 0.8mm bur. The pearl I'm going to add is 6mm in diameter and fits nicely onto the pin. I'll need to pick up some glue to secure it in place and then the only thing left is to attach a string of pearls or silver chain.

Abstract Cherry Blossom

Last night I worked on a pendant which didn't quite turn out as planned. I used white in my third layer to make some tree branches and then sifted about 4 different layers of pink, purple, and cream to try and produce something resembling a cherry blossom. It was all going fairly well until the very last firing where I was trying to get all layers to maturity so that the surface would be generally smooth and shiny. Because the previous seven firings had been successful I was surprised when I opened the kiln door and saw that the white enamel had been overfired and basically bled outwards.

It turns out that the white enamel that we got in our kits is a pretty hard enamel/colour and should only be used as the base coat and not for subsequent layers. Apparently I should have used what's called "foundation white" if I wanted to use white in a non-base layer (not very intuitive from the name). That would have been a softer enamel and wouldn't have required firing for so long. I ended up trying to add a few more layers of pink and green to cover up some of the white that had bled to the sides and that's where I left it at the end of the night. Not quite the way I wanted but not bad for a first design. I should call it "Abstract Cherry Blossom".

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant

I found an image of a beautiful gold swan pendant online that I wanted to try and reproduce.  I borrowed graver tools from my instructor who has about 33 different ones for making very detailed and intricate wax models. For this simple project one tool was enough!  Next week I will solder on jump rings so I can put it onto a chain, and also add a post so that I can put in a pearl.

Silver Band Ring

This silver band ring project was designed to make us practice our soldering, sawing, and polishing techniques.  We all started with a strip of silver 10mm wide.  After hammering, bending, and soldering the silver strip into a simple band ring we had to divide the ring into equal sections and add our own designs to each piece.  The final challenge was to solder the equal pieces back into a single ring.  Sound difficult? It was!

After my first soldering attempt the solder hadn't completely filled to edge of the gap so I had to add more after cleaning off the layer of oxidization. 

It took me a whole hour to saw the band ring into 3 pieces of equal width because I was trying to keep the cuts as straight as possible. The extra time it took me to saw the band ring paid off in the end because I didn't have to do nearly as much filing as I had feared to get the sides parallel with each other. In the end when I stacked the rings back together I measured about 9mm so I only lost 1mm in the process.

You can see the simple design I chose for the three pieces. I used the saw blade to cut the grooves in the middle ring and then filed semi-circles into the edges of the three pieces.

Here is the finished band ring after I soldered it all back together again. It turned out well on the outside but not great on the inside, which is better than having the opposite happen but is not completely satisfying.

The soldering went relatively well and none of it got into the grooves of the pattern, however I could have been more precise when wiring the three thin rings together into a stack to begin with. The middle piece was out of centre by a few fractions of a millimeter which was evident when I went to file the outside. I managed to file away the solder grooves from the outside except where they were intentionally left as part of the pattern on the top. Unfortunately You can see two thin dark lines on the inside of the ring where the solder grooves were.  Eventually the instructor told me to stop filing because the ring was getting too thin.  My OCD made that a challenge to do!

Lost Wax Casting: Carved Stone Ring (cont'd)

Here is the ring after I polished it with Tripoli compound.  There is excess Tripoli in the grooves of the ring which is why the cracks have a dark finish in these photos. It's a pretty nice effect but if I want to make it permanent I'll have to use some sort of chemical solution.

I put the ring into the ultrasonic to clean out the Tripoli and the ring was gleaming bright!