duckduckBLOGstuff

This blog is, really, for workstuff and not family stuff - but once in a while, the two cross over. Not often.

But it’s nearly the end of a school year, and the only-just-nine-year-old has had a great year, and loves his teacher unconditionally. Which is very sweet, and she is, it has to be said, entirely fabulous. So he decided he wanted to make, with me, a “jewellery” for her. A necklace. And another one for the classroom assistant (who is also entirely fabulous; I used to work with her and she is wonderful). So he chose some pretty glass and decided he wanted to set them in hoops - based on my more recent pieces. “Let’s make one like those”.
OK. Let’s make them like those. So we came to a deal - I’d make the bezel setting, he would make the hoops and actually set the cabs. Today we made the hoops. He wound the wire on the mandrel, cut it, filed the ends (I have to confess to finishing this off when he wasn’t looking), made said ends meet, ground and applied flux (only borax) and once I’d put the titchy solder pallions in place, “helped” me solder the hoops. That is - he sat on my knee and had his hand under mine on the torch. This is only a little butane thing, I add hastily, no oxy here… Then he quenched them. Carefully

Then, bless him, he put the hoops back onto the mandrel and carefully carefully and very gently hammered them into shape with a nylon hammer. And very beautifully he did it too:

There are, sadly, no photos of the cutting or soldering because my hands and eyes were too busy being Health and Safety police But you DO get to see my new workspace. This could never have happened on top of a washing machine…

Opals. mmmmmm, opals. what’s not to love about opals? I like the fact that sometimes they hide their beauty, only for it to come out in bright light, in the flashiest way imaginable.
Buying opals has become a bit of a hobby - until now, it’s been mostly boulder and matrix opal, preforms and rubs (this means they have been shaped but not polished). I worked out how to polish them without expensive equipment, and without spending days rubbing them down by hand with wet emery paper. I don’t have the mindset for that.

And today - a surprise. In my most recent packet of stones (including some really, really nice finished opal, mmm-hmmm) was a freebie little packet of Brazilian rough opal. Wow. The guy I buy from is lovely; a decent bloke and an enthusiast, and he gives the occasional free gift to good customers. But it was ROUGH rough. mmm, I thought. learning on free stuff is not a bad idea.

I have a little, nearly antique, hand-operated grinding wheel. It’s left-handed, to make it more fun - you turn with your right hand and hold the thing being ground down with your left hand. funfunfun! Fortunately I’m relatively ambidextrous, so it’s not a massive problem - and opal, it turns out, is a treat to shape like that. Oh yes.

So I shaped a piece into a little cab; no harsh edges in the middle of the curved face, feeling pretty pleased with myself so far. The I got out my new squashy abrasive block - this is some kind of very high density foam stuff impregnated with abrasive grit. Most excellent, it turns out, for rubbing opal. Then - rolled emery paper on a mandrel. Also very excellent. And next, the bit I am most, most pleased with - platinum/steel polish. It’s like rouge, only it’s “gris” and “vert“. Nasty, plasticy stuff to get onto a felt - but WOW does it polish opal nicely. Gorgeous, glassy finish.

The hard bit of this process is the grinding, and getting out any griding marks. The rest is, as they say, a piece of cake. Un bout de gateau, to go with all the polish.

So. There you have it - duckduckGoosestuff’s very own opal-polishing method. It will probably make purists cringe, but for me - it is a revelation.

You can’t see the glassy finish in the photos below - but you can see the lovely colours in the stone. In poor light it just looks vaguely translucent and grey, like jelly opal. But in the sun, it’s beautiful. And I am very happy. Not to mention very slightly smug

I apologise for the state of my hands. It’s hard to use abrasives without getting into a bit of a state…

and on that bottom one you can see a remnant of the polish on the tip of the stone. oops.

It’s half-term… I promised my son (8) that we’d go to the museum to look at the animatronic monsters - not a hard promise to keep, I love this kind of stuff. There was a lot about the history of the legends, where the ideas might have come from; old art and carvings and stories from the Greeks; and it went all the way up to a creepy grey alien twitching its fingers inside what looked exactly like a cartoon of a rocket from my childhood.

The mastodon skull (legend of the cyclops) was weird; modern elephants have the same, huge hole in the middle of the skull. It does look exactly like an eye-socket - but it’s where, obviously, the trunk is.

And there was an immense, roaring, blinking dragon. With a hoard. And there was a room full of beanbags and books, and another full of colouring stuff and pencils and sheets for drawing your own monster. The eight-year-old drew his own monsters. Built them out of lego. Rearranged magnetic monster bits to form new monsters. The four-year-old wanted help. So we sat down together and drew beaked dragons with smoke tricking from their nostrils; gripping round rocks with their weird lizard-feet. And coloured them.

When we came home I made this - it’s a thing that fell to earth; either alien or from a dragon that stole it from - somewhere. The back of the silver claw/scale has a scale pattern on it; the hoop is fused and only crudely hammered. The village smith who found it isn’t a great silver-worker and has never heard of solder, so the claw/scale is riveted to the hoop with a silver nail. The silver “stick” is the closure - the hoop will form part of a toggle and the chain will fasten at the font; the pendant is the catch.

the green gem, getting back to reality, is a flush-set emerald. I need to make a set of scaled hoops to link into a chain for it.

ok; Buried Treasury is a truly excellent new blog, bringing - well, the hidden treasures of Etsy into the public eye.

its HERE and it’s entirely fabulous.
while playing about, I found the most incredible shop, making beautiful, fun, attractive jewellery from - I’d kind of drag it out, but there is no way that anyone would guess, so I’ll just say - recycled balloons. Just amazing - like this one:

I’m awed. I want one!

This is the shop:

normal is boring and it’s great.

Check out Buried Treasuries, too - a lot of fun.

I like wire. I like the way it lies coiled up, shiny and expectant and ready to do something; the element of spring and the coil make it slightly unpredictable and alive. Sheet isn’t like that - I know if I use sheet I will take it and make it into something; with wire there’s a feeling that it’s helping you along the way.

The wire I really depend on - actually, that’s a bad start, I need a lot of different sizes, but possibly the most universally useful is 0.8mm. Which is about 20 gauge, if you’re still using a weird and complicated system of weights and measurements. It’s earwire width; earcoil width and has a myriad of other uses. Rings.

Anyway; a coupla weeks back I was about to run out, so I ordered some more from the bullion dealers, along with a load of other stuff and went off to pick up my order. My order is about £20 cheaper than I expect it to be, which given the state of the markets at the moment is Just Plain Wrong. No 0.8mm wire. No 0.8mm wire for a week. How can this be? (actually, bear in mind this is the same company that gave me three inches of bezel strip instead of 3 metres. what is anyone suppposed to do with three inches of bezel strip?! puhlease). WAH! how can I fulfill my orders?! I have earrings to make! Earcoils to make up (these are made to order depending on the customer’s width of gap between piercings) and post out. WAHH! Anyway, I ended up buying something called Brilliante silver; fine silver is far too soft for this - Brilliante is slightly purer than sterling but a different alloy, that takes a really high shine and is low tarnish. Cool. Problem solved.

No no no NO. niet. non. nein. Brilliante silver does NOT melt like sterling, fine silver, gold or copper. It does not ball when you heat the ends. No. You cannot make earwires or earcoils. So I had metres of teh stuff, unusable for its intended purpose. After sulking, writing apologetic letters to kind and understanding customers waiting for their earrings, wailing and gnashing my teeth, I cut it up into bits and started playong. I made rings. Part of a series started a while ago and sadly neglected - it started months back with rings inspired by barbed wire:

that was the first one… looks very good on:

the next one was simplified:

These two above were the originals, and because the Brilliante silver doesn’t ball or fuse in the same way that sterling does. I couldn’t make the barbs (they would have been dangerous!) so these are very solidly soldered. The last one is tiny, and I’m really pleased with it; I like the slightly feral feel to it. The front almost looks cast. But I like this technique, and I like the results; I’ll be making more. At least until I run out of Brilliante silver

Then after these have come the great big bezel-set dichroic rings - which couldn’t be more different. I seem to need contrasts.

I mentioned this in a previous post - a ring that I’d made that came from the patterns on butterflies’ wings; false eyes and dots.

This is it… it’s sadly flawed, un-sellable in its present state; I made a proper mess of the bezel. Never mind, it’s a learning curve, and I can use the design at some point. Fine silver is so, so soft - it’s like working with plasticine - plasticine that can’t be remodeled; sigh. and I pushed it too hard at the wrong times. I’m working on a way of smoothing down those jiggy-jaggy edges, but I’m not super-hopeful. The saving grace is that this is an opal triplet (I’m not daft enough to put an expensive stone into something I’m not sure about, fortunately!) and not only is it not a terribly costly error, the soft opal is covered with a hard crystal, which is a lot more forgiving of me poking it with a burnisher.

But here it is - a record and reminder to me - push bezels gently!

Starting points are odd things; they end up taking you down weird little alleyways in your head that you end up forgetting you’ve been down. Later you realise where the thing you’ve just produced has come from. Today I made a little ring with an eye-shaped centre piece with a really lovely opal triplet in it, surrounded by an asymmetric pattern of granulated silver. The opal was an absolute pig to set in that lot, come to think of it, but that’s kind of beside the point.

Anyway, I finished it (in the dark so no picture until tomorrow, oops) and I sat and looked at it, and thought what on earth does that remind me of, exactly? And I thought of raver girls with glitter round their eyes, and I thought of aliens from dodgy episodes (like there’s any other kind, ahem) of Star Trek, and finally wound up at butterflies and the patterns on thei wings. Which then made perfect sense - the Etsymetal street team (link to the side, over there –>) had this month’s challenge as “insects” - to make a pieces or pieces based on insects. I doodled and drew and sketched little twiddly things that got further and further away from representational, put the sketch book away, and eventually this filtered to the surface, totally unconsciously. Minds are weird things.

The necklace below was a conscious response. It’s a ladybird. Really

I’ll photograph the butterfly wing ring tomorrow.

…if you’re really, really good. Not to mention in possession of a slightly skewed view of the world, which is a good thing, I hasten to add:

Stephanie Metz

Very clever stuff.

Alchemy being Etsy’s reinstated feature where buyers post what they are looking for, and makers bid for the privilege of making…

It kind of suits me; there are odd little quirky requests on there that tie in completely with my mindset and way of working; these little earrings are a case in point. They are actually a design I had been meaning to make for myself for a while, and hadn’t got round to; so finding the request on Alchemy was a bit of a gift.

They are a corkscrew of wire, balled at one end, that is designed to be worn through two piercings in one ear. It feeds through the first hole, coils round to the front again and feeds through the second. A little “tail” shows under the ear, curled away from the neck; and they are held in place with a scroll-back. They are made specifically for the customer, who has hole in her ears that are 7 mm apart High-shine finish. I love them!

I’ve got a couple more Alchemy pieces in progress - one of which is a real, real one-off, working with the customer’s own materials, which I’m really excited about; and another one I have my fingers desperately crossed for, just because I want to make it so much! That’s the thing I like about the feature - it will never make me rich, but the opportunity to think a little laterally and work within someone else’s idea but still in my own way, really appeals. It’s an enrichment opportunity. Do I sound pretentious? I’m sure I do… But that’s the thing - and I think “Alchemy” is a very apt name. For me, at least.

All the photos below are of 0.8mm (20 gauge) wire. I have made the catch a little larger than is actually practical for this gauge so that it shows clearly in the pictures.

You will need:

wire - 20 gauge is the thinnest practical, you can go up to whatever gauge you are comfortable working with

needle-nose pliers and snipe-nose pliers (if you only have the needle-nose it’s not a disaster, you can use these)

wire-cutters - I find cheapy nail-clippers the best for wire, to be honest

a needle-file and emery paper - if you have a polishing set-up, that’s lovely, but you can make nice matte-finish catches without one

an anvil or block and one of those little brass/nylon double-ended hammers.

First of all, take your wire (I’ve gone all Mrs Beeton, haven’t I?). Don’t cut a piece - if you work from the whole piece with most of the slack rolled up and secured, there will be no wastage at all.
File the end smooth, so there are no jaggies, and with the needle-nose pliers, bend the end up to form a little “flick”. Like this:

then, using the part of the pliers that corresponds to the width of clasp that you are looking for, grasp the wire tightly and bend it around the pliers to form the top of the clasp:

You should now have something that looks like the top of a shepherd’s crook:

Next, just below that first little “flick” thta you made, grasp the other side of the hook tightly with your pliers and bend the wire away from the hook at a right angle, like this:

Now move your pliers around a little, so they are at the angle shown in the photo below:

and make a complete loop around one arm of the pliers. I have moved them a little in this photo - once you have made a couple of these you’ll know the most comfortable way for you to hold the wire and pliers. But this is what you should have now:

Here is where the snipe-nose (I think you might know these as half-round) pliers come in handy. If you don’t have them, you can hold the loop by poking the round-nose pliers through it. Anyway. Grasp the end of the loop firmly between the pliers:

and wrap the wire a couple of times around. Cut the wire and leave a little end sticking out, thus:

File the end down until it is smooth, and then squeeze it down flush to the catch - the snip-nose pliers are best for this. You should now have a catch that looks like this:

It looks like a catch - it is a catch! but it is soft and still bendy. You need to temper the metal - and this is where the anvil comes in.

Place the top end of the catch flat on the anvil, as in the picture below. You’ll need to hold the end of it in place against the rest of the catch while you hammer, otherwise it will open itself up while you do it. If you want the wire to remain round, use the nylon end of the hammr; if you want to flattern it out (my preference), use the metal end. Remember to keep the face of the hammer (the bit you hit with) pretty much parallel to the anvil, and remember that hitting several times relatively gently is a much, much better idea than thumping at it as if you’re trying to bang a nail into the wall. Don’t over-hammer; the metal will end up thin and at worst fatigued.

Turn the catch around, and repeat the process with the closed loop at the end. I like to use this part of the process to bend the loop down at an angle slightly, but don’t worry if this makes no sense to you, it doesn’t have to:

Us the needle file to get rid of an really nasty marks, then smooth the whole thing with emery paper. You should have one of these:

You can polish it or use it as it is. I think the photos are pretty self-explanatory even without the text - the one thing I didn’t manage to do was to take a photo of the hammering (not enough hands) but I don’t actually think that was necessary anyway