Creating jewelry means being tool-inventive

Anyone who has worked for a while in a workshop will know, that you ever so often find yourself in a situation where you need something to help you finish a job and you don't have that wonder-tool around. Sometimes it's because you just don't own one, sometimes because it doesn't exist. In any case, the solution is to create one or find a substitute in order to proceed. I often giggle a bit by myself when I see how I go about it and am thinking ”good thing my customers don't get to see this – they'd never take me or my jewelry serious!”

But then again – we humans would have never evolved to whatever (more or less brilliant) stage we are at currently, if it hadn't been for our creative minds and so I'm okay with it. If it gets the job done, I'm peachy.

So, here are 3 of my latest twists to the toolbox, free for everyone to copy or laugh at ;-)

Roll it baby!

Recently I created a bracelet for the first time in many years and needed a mandrel to support it, while setting the stone. In the wonderful forum on Etsy that I attend with some fantastically skilled and very nice jewelry smiths, it was suggested to use an old baseball bat, if you didn't have a proper bracelet mandrel lying around. Well, I live in Denmark, and the national sport here is soccer and hence, old used baseball bats isn't something more or less everybody can get their hands on. And an air-filled leather ball just won’t cut it I'm afraid, so I had to get inventive and find something else, fast. So here we are. May I present the stone-rolling-pin-come-mandrel? Maybe not the most charming setup, but it worked. Ha!

Perched on a peg soldering

When creating rings like I do with a lot of tiny doo-dads resting on and around the focal stone (and other places), it's impossible to just stack it on and solder it. You have to have some kind of support, mimicking the way the finger eventually will carry the ring. Yes, you can buy lovely soldering pegs for just that purpose, but I just never got around to do that. Instead I ended up sawing and filing a piece of soldering mat so it would roughly fit the curve of the ring -and using another piece to wedge the ring tight so it doesn't move. Some day I'm gonna get a professional one, but this version works reasonably well and I am happy with the end result.

Soothing vanilla saw blades

KLING -another saw blade broke. Argh! Bile is rising and you feel like throwing the piece you are working on through the room and yell something obscene. Grumbling and with a deep soon-to-meet-Botox crease in your forehead you reach out for the batch of yet unbroken saw blades. And all of a sudden, the soothing scent of vanilla, bringing happy memories of ice cream on the beach and that lovely sunset to your mind hits your nostrils. How? Because I am keeping my saw blades in one of those test-tubes that you can buy real vanilla pods in. Once you have scraped out the seeds and used those for something delicious and have blended the left-over and now empty pods with sugar to create luxuriously rich vanilla sugar, you are left with a nice and still very fragrant test tube with lid. Botox has moved a tad further into the future, thanks to using it as a saw blade container :-)

A stubborn heart

Valentines is just around the corner and I’m creating jewelry with hearts – of cause. I have made a number of dainty little beauties which are neat, but I got the urge to create something bigger and a tad different. I love jewelry with details on the back or other little secrets that only the bearer knows of. And so I set out to create a locket-style necklace –or rather a kind of silver folder, which means HINGE. It’s been a few years since I made a locket and it’s difficult – you easily end up soldering everything together. However, I had chosen a simplified way of hinging the thing and arrogantly thought that it would be a walk in the park. Little did I know, that I was to embark on hours and hours of frustration where everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

But first I created the bezel for the garnet cap, sawed out the front heart and the back and the pieces of tubing I needed for the hinge. I was planning on letting the hinge double as a bezel, creating a fairly simple design.

And then onto soldering………………………….. it all together :-(

Looks neat, right? What you don’t see is that all parts are very much sticking together, not letting anything move whatsoever! I swore loudly and trampled around the workshop before sitting down and unsoldering it. I hate unsoldering. It’s messy, much more cleanup-time and just not very satisfying. It all stuck because I didn’t use any kind of block. I could also have used another cool technique which one of my fellow Etsyans advised me of using hard solder to JUST forming a ball, then carefully taking it apart and soldering it with medium solder, not allowing the hard one to melt too, but to allow it to keep everything in place.

So, what now? Well, I soldered the middle part of the hinge back onto the back part (cleanup) and though that I could just use this part as a guide when placing the tubes of the upper part and then remove the back part when the flux had crystallized and was holding things in place. So though, so I did and here is the result:

OF CAUSE it doesn’t fit! The tubes are flush with the base they have been soldered on –which is too “high” Doh! More swearing and trampling –actually I gave up that day. Next day I braced myself and thought “I’d be damned if this piece will have me –I’ll show it who’s in charge” and came up with another solution: I found a piece of copper of the same thickness as the back plate silver sheet and slipped it under the front heart –staying far away from the hinge parts of cause. Again using the back part as a guide, I now succeeded in soldering the tubes on in the position they ought to have. See!

And the hinge works!

Now for a LOOOOONG time of cleanup and sanding –and then more sanding when it turned out that I had of cause created fire scale during the battle – and then finally for the decoration. I wanted a few words of love on the inside, for the bearer only to know, and a scrollwork decoration on the outer layer, plus a little 14 carat golden heart that I had sawed out and domed. Here you see how I again used the copper sheet to stabilize IF the hinges would in any way think of moving while I was soldering on the heart.

Final cleanup, then LOS and a finishing polish and I was ready to set the cab and string it to the burgundry leather cord. And here it is –tadaaaaaa!

It was a struggle, but I am actually quite satisfied with the outcome! Now I guess I should be creating another little folder while I remember how ;-)