For my next pendant project I decided to try a dragonfly and aimed to make it thinner and lighter than the swan. I started with a 2mm-thick piece of wax and filed it down to 1.7mm. Then I used needle files to start forming the overall shape of the dragonfly and borrowed a graver from the instructor to do the grooves in between the wings and beads of the body.
Here it is after I finished casting it in sterling silver. Again the white colour is from the fine silver which hasn't been polished off yet. I made a rubber mold of this pendant after soldering on jump rings and polishing it down a bit. This time it was alot more difficult to cut the two halves apart in the same plane where the pendant was because the dragonfly is much thinner than the previous swan pendant!
I ended up giving this necklace to my friend and then cast one of the blue duplicates for myself. I tried finishing the pendants with the polishing wheel to get a high-shine coating but was unsuccessful. Because the pendant is so thin it heated up very quickly with friction. This softened the metal (making it easy to bend) and meant it was very difficult to hold onto the pieces for more than a second or two at a time - hot hot hot! Eventually I settled for using a tiny polishing wheel with my handpiece. It couldn't do the job as well as a polishing wheel but saved me from getting any more burns on my fingers!
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