I Saw Silver!

My final projects from the two days with Sarah Lock are all about the jeweler’s saw and a bunch of tiny little blades. I glued together two sheets of sterling silver and added my drawing to the top. I drilled holes in the design using a dremel tool that had been set up like a mini drill press (gotta get me one of those base thingi’s for my dremel!) Then carefully threading the saw’s blade through the hole and tightening it up, I commenced sawing. And sawing… and sawing... and sawing… Punctuated only by breaking saw blades. Take out the broken blade, figure out which direction and which side up the new blade goes, thread it through the work and tighten it in the saw frame, add some bee’s wax and then get back to work(and repeat!) There is a real learning curve to this process and by the end I was getting much more distance out of each blade.

It is still something that takes forever and my cuts are nothing compared to Sarah’s!! So when I was finally done sawing, I had two positive fleur de lis shapes and two negative shapes. So first of all I soldered a copper back to one and formed a large square pendant. Polishing it took forever and I noticed in the photo that when I wiped it on my shirt to remove the big fingerprint right before I snapped the photo… I scratched it up pretty good. Oh well, life does that to ya. Oh, and I added that teensy tiny little fleur to it but I might change that out and put a crystal briolette there instead. I think that might look better.

I made the two positive shapes into big dangly earrings, they are light weight so it works. I really enjoyed wailing away on these things with the whammer and look forward to more of that. It feels destructive but it’s actually quite constructive in this situation. Then I went off to spend some quality time with the polishing wheels. I added ear wires and a coin pearl to each one. The conventional wisdom of the class was that they would make better pendants because they are so big and I might go there eventually, but for right now I LURVE them as earrings!

I have another one of the negative shapes to do something with. In the process of polishing it on the wheel those points kept catching on the wheel and it would go flying out of my hand. Now that made me jumpy! I finally learned (mostly) how to do it but that piece is pretty delicate now after all that damage. No worries though, I have enough fleur de lis jewelry to last me a while.

I’m delighted that I was able to take Sarah’s class! I learned so much from her and it is good to be able to sink oneself into an absorbing task and learn to do something new. Sara Lock is an amazing woman, very sweet with incredible skills and a creative approach to problem solving. She was pulled in a million directions by the six of us but she handled it with patience and grace.