Agate Pendant

Ok change of plans. I had originally envisioned making some stud earrings for myself but decided at the last minute to make a pendant instead. The instructor cautioned that if I went with studs it would be very easy to break off the earring posts when I went to set the stones. Since you can't apply heat to metal after setting stones, I wouldn't have been able to re-solder the posts back on or do a whole lot with my finished cabochon settings if I had been so unfortunate.

I decided to switch gears and make a pendant using my two settings. If I had planned this properly I would have selected different sized stones, or different stones altogether, just to make it more interesting.  In the end

Here is the agate pendant with the cabochons set. Finishing this piece off proved to be much more frustrating and challenging than I had thought. The truly frustrating part was keeping the pendant fixed using the waxy resin. The problem was that the resin was considerably contaminated from being used in previous classes so it did a very poor job of holding the pieces in place while I set the stones.

After about the twelfth time of it coming loose (and having made little progress on setting the stones) the instructor gave me a pitch pot of which there was only one for the whole class. The tar in the pitch pot was unbelievably  more effective in securing the settings than the resin and I was able to complete my pendant with far less cursing!