Thursday, October 1, 2015

Happily Working Along

I've been working on one of the litho square pieces and have expanded it to include a heart and hang from a two strand necklace with silver spacers. 

On one of the jewelry sites someone was using these great little tooled ends - my friend sent me the reference and I got some.  Today I pounded out a few designs and decided to make fancy headpins from them.  I needed an interesting one for the heart anyway.

     My friend, Susan asked me how I soldered the wires
     into the backs of the little buggers so I decided I'd post                                                            it here too.  After the designs are hammered in the front
the piece is removed the design steel by hammering a nail setting tool into the back of it.  It also leaves a mighty nice indentation on the back of the molded silver dot.  I push the silver form into a soldering board and use self locking tweezers to hold the wire in place.  I solder with easy solder since you don't need anything stronger.  You aren't going to be adding any other pieces so why use hard solder.  

For the ones in the top picture I had added a silver sheet round to the bottom and it covered up my center hole.  The best way to handle that is to then make your own divot in the sheet.  That divot is easily accomplished with a round burr that is either a cutting or grinding burr.  The burr shown in the picture happens to be a diamond coated grinder. 

           See the larger head pin on the heart?
                                           
In this last picture are two of the smaller head pins.  They will be great with bead earrings.  I haven't yet explored all of the possibilities but I'm off to a great start and it's wonderful to be back in the studio again.


Have a
great
Friday!!

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