Jewelry!

I am long overdue for a post. Make that a few posts. The past two weeks have been great, especially riding and jewelry wise. Caesar and I put in a good run at the pipe opener and an even better run at a horse trial this past weekend, but I will write a longer post on that at a later date.

I have been slowly but surely creating some new jewelry pieces and honing my new skills. I have improved my sawing skills, and I can now cut out tiny whimsical pieces that I quite fancy (another student said "Your pieces are so small!" :) I designed a pendant in honor of Caesar; his registered name is "Hound Deer", and while it's ridiculous (his sire's name is Deer Hound which makes sense, but Hound Deer, what the heck is that?), the name has grown on me. So I drew and cut out a tiny brass deer and hound. I then sweat soldered the pieces onto silver. The hound finished nicely, but the deer had a strange reaction with the silver. I know now that silver and brass don't get along, but I had to learn the hard way (as you can see here):



I may salvage the hound portion and craft another deer out of copper and mount it on silver, making two little pendants that can sit side by side. Poor hound and deer...

Today I learned to make cold connections; I already knew how to sweat solder (attach two pieces of metal using a solder torch), but I was excited to learn how to connect metals and objects with no heat. Basically we learned to make rivets, tiny little hand-created nails. And...I love cold connections! Or at least after making my first three! Ha! And I completed a mixed media piece today! I love it! I pressed brass wire mesh into a piece of delicate Japanese paper and then mounted the combination between two pieces of metal: a piece of brass that I texturized and flattened and a copper cut-out of a branch (the silhouette of which I used in an earlier piece). I attached the three pieces with three rivets. This is the final piece:



I then made some simple earrings by forging brass and attaching an amethyst bead:


Here are the two together:


Please excuse the grainy photos; still learning to properly photograph jewelry. Maybe I am just proud to be moving in new directions, but I am quite pleased!

I will be working on several more pieces in Mississippi this week as Mike and I are headed down south; I hope to post photos soon!