A blacksmith came by

Recently, my gallery has gained a new acquaintance. His name is Kasper, and he does iron age blacksmithing! Now, obviously, without a furnace, he couldn’t work within his trait, but he circled my grandfathers old ambos with a lot of love and asked how silver reacted to being forged. Now, I don’t do MUCH forging – I flatten out wires to achieve that elegant whiplash effect that I always aim for, but apart from that… not so much. At some point I have tried to stretch a piece of silver to become thinner – and failed, wondering how on earth that is done. I can now report that I know!

 

So, Kasper was given a piece of silver – roughly 6x30 mm and 2 mm thick to play around with.

Kasper has never worked with silver and never so small, so to him it was a real challenge. He had to use far smaller hammers and pliers than usual and get a lot closer. Then again – since the metal isn’t hot when being forged, it’s a lot safer.

And so of he set, creating his specialty: the woman’s knife. It’s a very beautiful tool that every woman who was worth anything, was carrying. He learned a lot about silver and I learned a lot about forging – and also what some of those weird tools that came along with grandfathers anvil was for.

And here we are: a tiny, 3 cm long silver iron age knife, oxidized to get that original, dark look.

Here you see how tiny it is compared with the originals, which are approximately 12 cm long.

I think it’s VERY beautiful, and have suggested that he starts producing more of those knifes – both the real-size in iron and the small silvery one for pendants and sell them on Etsy and Amio. I think he will, eventually, so keep a lookout for Danish iron age knives

My tumble polisher has arrived!!! Hooray!

Naturally I had to immediately create something that used the full potential of it (polishing and hardening is tumbled long enough) and so I threw myself into creating a chain consisting of 38 individual links. Most of them are curly, but 13 of them are just oval hoops. The curly ones are just SO my style although a bit of a hassle to create:

First I ran up one or two ends with the torch (basically melting the tip of the silver wire, which then behaves like any other liquid and shapes a drop. In order to get the right curve to the finished shape, I angled the wire to almost horizontal, forcing the drop to hang almost sideways from the wire).

Then I shaped the individual hoops (and I mean individual –no two are the same) and soldered half of them close. After etching I hammered chosen parts flat in order to lend it the art nouveau “schwung” I always crave of my lines and started assembling the soldered hoops with the still open. Soldering the rest of the hoops too was a tad challenging: a lot of small pieces of solder to place and NOT to accidentally tilt off again. And noooo… I was too lazy to do it in small quantities – I did the whole chain in one go! Luckily I succeeded *grin*. Afterwards I hammered details on the freshly soldered chains -now much harder to get to right becaus eof the links they were connected too, but I managed quite well.

And so the new tumbler came into use and didn’t let me down: After 4 hours of tumbling (these are delicate things, so I wanted them to harden a lot to keep their shape) I was very satisfied with the result.

However, after having looked at it for some hours, I decided to add a little extra and replaced one of the round hoops with one made of 18 carat gold. You don’t notice at the first glance, but it’s just so cool and understated and makes the whole thing very special.

It took me over 6 hours to create this chain (plus tumbling of cause), but I am very satisfied with the result, and hurried to take a picture of my mum wearing it.

By the way:
When I was listing this chain on Etsy I measured it and counted the links: There are 38 links and it measures 83 cm! Spooky, eh?

This necklas was sold end of november. You can still see more pictures of the finished item here. I loved it and will therefore probably create something similar again. Perhaps with some set stones?

Male jewelry –something quite different

Most of my stuff is very feminine, curved, curled, soft and biomorph. Sometimes, however, I long to make something rather chunky and coarse, which is when I create jewelry “for the stronger gender” as I call it on Etsy. So yesterday I created this cool necklace, consisting of a forged sterling silver wire, which has been shaped into a snail. Actually there were quite a few more steps to it.


Firstly, the wire I had was somewhat thicker, and so I hammered it down to the approximate size of 2 mm, annealing it a few time in the process. Annealing is necessary because the silver hardens when hammered. At some point it’s impossible to change its shape further and you have to heat it up to a soft rosy glow and then cool it down again in order to soften it enough for continuous forging.

Afterwards I “ran up” the ends by applying intense heat to them, which melts the metal into a soft ball. When it had been cooled and through the acid (to remove any stains from the heat), I filed these ball-shaped ends into the needed shape (flat in one end, round in the other which was to be the middle, and started shaping the snail with tweezers. Due to the thickness of the wire, that is quite tough work I can tell you, and my hands are still a bit sore from it. Some polishing made the pendant come lock perfect.

Now off to the ends that were to be attached to the leather cord: I know they exist pre-made, but I just couldn’t find any in the right size (that is: large enough –and we like large for our men ;-) so I had to create them myself. I cut two pieces of silver tube and soldered them onto a 1 mm sheet. Then cut them out and filed smooth, before attaching the hoops, which I had shaped into ovals.


A last filing after the acid bath and some buffing and we were ready for the assembly.



I think it came out quite nice. It looks great as a necklace, doubles as a bracelet, when wound twice and doesn’t fall off by accident because of the oval hoop/oval end of the snail, which only allows it to slide off when turned 90 degrees.


I am considering if it would look cool too with some kind of coarsely cut gems or wooden beads…
Want it? Well, it's for sale here