Thing a Week - Weeks 16-20

This has been a most stressful time! My job keeps getting in the way of my jewelry work. So finally I have another Thing a Week update, this time with six different items. I will show rather than tell this time - all pieces are described in my Etsy shop.

THaW 16 - budding blueberry twig earrings

THaW 17 - strawberry cuff bracelet with ruby

THaW 18 - blue chalcedony ring with matte finish

THaW 19 - moonstone and star sapphire ring

THaW 20 - lady's mantle pendant with tanzanite

THaW 21 - blue lagoon pendant with turquoise

Thing a Week- Weeks 13-15

Another combined Thing A Week report. So far so good, I haven't yet had a week where I haven't finished something, which is a good sign. I must say that it has been really hard to stay indoors with the wonderful spring weather we've had lately. We'll see if I'm able to keep up the good work..

Week 13

This is my first project in gold. I'm not sure I would have done it if not a colleague had requested these earrings. She had seen similar earrings by me in silver and wanted them in 18K gold.
So I ordered the tiniest amount of supplies possible and got started. And I can now say: I love gold! It was extremely nice to work with, except for the awareness that the gold dust that I can't possibly collect when sawing or filing is a loss that I'll have to accept. And another thing that wasn't so nice is the thought that stays in your brain as long as you work with it: Must. Not. Screw. Up.
The 'phew' feeling when I had polished them and set the stones was pretty big. And oh yes, my colleague bought them.

Week 14

This week I managed to continue doing things I am uncomfortable with. This time it was prongs. I have a few prong projects, some of which are finished, some of which may never get finished. I had tried this particular design before and had a hard time soldering on all the prongs. This time I drilled holes where I wanted the prongs, then hammered a little nail head on a piece of wire and put the wire through the holes with the nail head in the back. Then soldered all of them at the same time. Easy! The stone is a wonderful translucent mint green prehnite, rounded both on the front and in the back.




Week 15

This was another custom order, and again a challenge for me. A colleague (a different one) gave me a stone she had once been given. She didn't know what it was but it looks like quartz or white topaz. The challenge was to set a big (and high) faceted stone in a simple, elegant pendant. I did most of the pendant at my metalsmithing class, and currently I cannot repeat the way that it was done at home - though there are other ways. I made a sterling silver oval ring that matched the stone as prefectly as possible. Then I ground a seat for the stone and made the rest of the pendant with round wire. I used a hammer hand piece for flexshafts to set the stone, and then polished the area around the setting.

Thing a Week- 8 and 9

For these Things a Week I have actually stepped out of my comfort zone. It's not always easy to do so. Like with everything, you need time, a healthy dose of optimism, and a certain disregard for things that can go wrong (especially with the silver price being as high as it is).

Week #8:

These filigree moonstone earrings are made with traditional filigree patterns and thin twisted filigree wire. Making filigree is tricky because of the thin wire and the many soldering points - always a risk for melting. Time will tell if these were a result of beginner's luck or if I have finally learned to control my torch a little.

Week #9:

This little hedgehog has been sculpted in metal clay. I don't sculpt much, but I'd like to do more of it, especially with results like these. I made the sterling silver band of the ring in a wavy pattern, to symbolize the erratic way animals sometimes walk when following  their noses. This little hedgehog will soon appear in my Etsy shop.

Thing a Week, week 6 and 7

Thing a Week #6

Is it spring soon? I thought so last week, I even saw catkins in my garden! The rest is buried in snow but catkins! That means spring soon. I was so excited that I made this pendant using metal clay:

It's not that easy to get flower imprints to show well, since petals are so delicate, but in this case it went pretty well. I put a nice ruby cab in the center. I'm happy with how this one turned out, the flower looks real and alive. :)

Thing a Week #7

I'm continuing the red theme. I have made similar earrings like these before, when I didn't know how to pick solder. Now that I can pick solder they are still a challenge! There's a lot of soldering and to make them matched is not that easy either. I left the backs of the stone settings open so the light can come through and you can see the amazing color in the stones.

Thing a week, week 4 and 5

Ha! Already I am slacking with blogging about my Thing a Week creations. Sadly this probably is a forewarning of things to come this year. If I may predict: I will not manage to do all my THaWs, I will definitely not blog about all of them, and if I have any readers then they will be lucky if I blog about anything else in between. But making jewelry is always priority number 1, and blogging will always be priority number, well.

So this post will show you two THaWs, number 4 and number 5, which is nice for you because looking at pictures is always nicer than reading text by someone who obviously has no significant writing skills.

THaW 4 is this turquoise ring with a little leaf. These leaves have grown on me. I use them as details in a lot of my jewelry. They are the perfect size and have the perfect little leaf structure for being a great little decoration that goes with a lot of things. The stone is a high quality turquoise that I managed to snatch up from Lapidarious before anyone else had the chance. It's rare to find natural untreated and high quality turquoise nowadays - usually you don't know what you buy, so this is a true gem!

THaW2011-4

THaW 5 is another ring (yes, next time I'll try to make something else, but I do love rings) that looks like a stacking ring but isn't. Stacking rings are immensely popular and I understand why. You can combine them just the way you like them, adding a personal touch to your jewelry. For me, as a jewelry maker, stacking rings are difficult terrain. Whatever I do I will make something that someone else has already made. You could say that this goes for any jewelry item, and it does, to some extent, but the stacking ring is a very limited area with relatively narrow space for letting imagination flow. Hence this stacking ring illusion. You can find both rings in my Etsy shop.

THaW2011-5

THAW2011-2

Aspiring Metalsmiths January Challenge and THAW2011-2, originally uploaded by SilverBlueberry.

It's Thing a Week time again! This is week number two, and let me say, it is a good week.

I let my THAW week 2 entry and my entry for a challenge organized by Etsy team Aspiring Metalsmiths overlap, since two challenging items in one week plus a full time day job is a bit much.

I said in my previous post on THAW that I wanted to challenge myself in both technique and design in my entries. And here I said that I wanted to learn riveting. So voila and check! Sometimes you haven't used certain techniques and you think 'I can't' and 'I don't know how' but then you just try it and.. succeed. I love it when it's like that (believe me, not always the case).

The Aspiring Metalsmiths challenge is described here. It asks of us to explore our roots and translate that into a piece of jewelry. I'm a molecular biologist and work with genes, so it was only natural that instead of thinking of my own Dutch and Romanian roots I thought a little further back, and of our evolution into Homo sapiens.

It is not easy to identify what makes us human. Many qualities that we possess have later been found to exist in other species as well. One important quality that is believed to have meant a lot for the development of humanity is speech. A mutation that happened a few hundred thousand years ago in the fox2p gene may be crucial for the development of speech in humans.

The cuff I made had part of the DNA sequence of the human fox2p gene (including the mutation) on the inside. I riveted a thin silver plate to the outside of the cuff and stamped it with our branch of the evolutionary tree, starting with eukaryotes and ending in Homo, our species.

I really enjoyed making something where I could use my scientific background. Maybe there will be other projects like these..

THAW - week 1

call of the wood nymph pendant, originally uploaded by SilverBlueberry.

From now on I will - hopefully - write a weekly post with one new jewelry item. This is part of a year long challenge that a group of metalsmiths including myself are participating in. The challenge is to design and make one new piece every week, i.e Thing a Week or THAW.

Everyone can set the THAW challenge the way they want it to. My THAW goals for this year are:
- to make a new design every week and keep the timelines
- to challenge myself: use methods and make items that I am not comfortable with

This week's item, number one, is the Call of the Wood Nymph pendant. It is a new design for me, with a pierced design at the top, and soldered details to the right. I don't often mix copper and silver, but I love the combination and I should use it more often. In the center is a beautiful atlantiscite triangular stone.