Lost Wax Casting: Dragonfly Pendant

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!

Cloisonne Pendant (cont'd)

Progressing slowly on the pendant. For the background I wet-packed two layers of Grass Green for shadowing and then added a layer of Peppermint Green which needs a second or third coating. The butterfly wings have two layers of Rose Pink but the colour isn't as bright as I expected. I also added a layer of Perriwinkle in the tips of the wings but after firing it seems to have blended with the pink. The body has an opaque yellow until I can think of what else to do with it.

Pendant after two layers

Almost done. I wet-packed several more layers into the cloisonne and the colours are becoming more vibrant. The cloisonne was beginning to curve from all of the firings so the instructor helped me flatten the piece by heating it up and then smashing it flat between two heavy metal plates immediately after removing it from the kiln. It didn't seem like a very sophisticated technique but was very effective. I was skeptical that the enamel wouldn't just crack off. In fact, it would have if we had smashed it even 5 seconds later and the piece had cooled down too much. 

After the cloisonne was flat it was easy to stone, which involves scrubbing it under running water with a piece of carborundum (silicon carbide). This removed excess enamel that was covering the cloisonne wire so now the butterfly outline looks like it is glowing. The cloisonne will undergo one last firing to maturity next week.

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!

Agate Earrings

After finishing up with the silver band ring I started on my final project in the Jewellery I course. We were learning about cabochons and bezel settings for our next ring project but I was leaning towards making a pair of stud earrings instead.  Here are the Botswana Agate cabochons I picked up along Queen street. In this photo I just finished hammering out the walls of the bezel setting using the bezel mandrel.

Cloisonne Pendant

Last night I started my cloisonne pendant which involved using tweezers and my fingers to tediously form delicate thin strips of copper into shape and then adhere them to the pendant using Klyr-fire. The piece was then put in the kiln and heated until the copper strips started to sink into the clear flux base coat (but not touching the actual copper base).

This was the largest piece of copper I had which is about 4cm x 4cm. When I drew the butterfly onto paper and shaped the copper strips on top of the sketch I forgot that I had previously drilled holes into the top of the pendant. When I transferred the copper strips to the actual pendant I couldn't find an arrangement that avoided overlapping the wings with either of the holes. Because forming the butterfly shape had been so tedious I decided not to tamper further with the design and will just need to work with what I have.

The next step will be to wet-pack the enamel powder into the different cells (rather than sifting which offers less control). The pendant has to be pickled in between each firing since the copper strips are bare and will develop firescale each time. Since the wire was not bent completely flat you can see some small gaps between the strip and the pendant base in the top right photo. Once I begin to add layers of enamel into the cells the gaps will disappear and the strips will be held much more solidly in place.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

My initial plan was to just put the pendant onto a simple string of pearls but after trying on the necklace a few times I decided I didn't like the way it hung. The pendant is quite thick and heavier then it ought to be so it created a sharp 'V' shape to the necklace instead of a nice curvature.

I switched gears and came up with a design that is a bit more elaborate. Due to the weight of the pendant I couldn't make the droops of pearls symmetric but ultimately I still liked the effect.

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

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.