The Evil Eye is Among us…

At last I have finished the Evil Eye necklace. It has taken an age, which is quite appropriate as the whole idea of ‘The Evil Eye’ is an ancient one.

Wikipedia have a good article on The Evil Eye here.

I was taught the version of the Evil Eye that says that you can put a curse on people using your own ‘evil eye’. Well I’m not sure about that, but as Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.

So… The Peridot is set, the silver polished and hallmarked, the chain is complete and the Aventurine, wrapped. The Evil Eye is here for one individual in this universe, to use, to ward off those evil spirits and bad luck.

And the silver ‘eye’ is polished so that you reflect all of those bad things away from you (if you are interested in having the Evil Eye on your neck you can see it in my Etsy shop and shortly Folksy and Joolia too):

The Evil Eye

Close up of Peridot iris

The Evil Eye Necklace: Progress, Part 1 – First Disaster

As its single green and blazing eye turned towards the girl, her startled face, white against the dark background of the Alps turned to see the thing in all its horrifying glory.

So, the evil eye necklace is progressing (see also my earlier post on this piece) …slowly… here is what I have done over the last few days:

I was originally going to make a  similar chain using silver wire formed into circles around a mandrel and I did start off like this but then this happened:

I made a set of rings for the chain, you do this by wrapping sterling silver wire (in this case 1.5mm diameter wire) around a mandrel (i.e. anything that allows you to create a  nice circle). I then soldered each ring to close it and pickled the rings in 10% sulphuric acid solution at around 60 degrees centigrade for a while (it’s not chemistry, exactly). This removes any fire stain that forms during the soldering process (firestain being caused by copper impurities in the silver forming a copper oxide, giving  it a stained appearance: ‘pickling’ in sulphuric acid dissolves the copper oxide leaving nice clean silver behind). Once I had pickled the rings I then took them up to the house to be tumbled to make them extra shiny and harden them too. I left them beside the tumbler ready to put in the next morning.

When i went to put them in the tumbler the next day, the tissue that I’d used to wrap them in was gone. I hunted high and low and eventually found out they had been thrown away by mistake, as it looked just like a ‘crunpled old bit of tissue’. You can imagine my reaction…grrrrr

After being in a bad mood for a while (quite a while actually). I decided to start again. I couldnt face making a load of rings again, so i decided to start a fresh approach and instead I used square strip sterling silver to make individual links. I’ll talk about that in my next post.

I was going to show you a photo of me looking angry, but instead here is a picture of the Tribbles from Star Trek to make you feel relaxed:

I Love Peridot: The Evil Eye My New Creation

peridot stone for the evil eye necklace

This may sound a little weird… but my dad was Irish and he brought me (and the rest of my siblings) up, to believe that he had come from Irish gypsies who had bestowed upon him the powers of ‘the evil eye’ (see Wiki on this subject) and in turn he would teach us how to apply the evil eye. He was a little crazy my father, but anyway, he did the whole, this is how to do the evil eye thing, but… it must only be used on those who wish (or have done) you harm. And, most importantly, you should not use the evil eye without good cause (I think that is against the evil eye committee rules, or something).

What I am leading up to, in the above ramble, is my new, Peridot based project: The Evil Eye Necklace – to ward off evil spirits. I can’t start it until I have finished the Homage to the Sun God Beryl project, but that will be soon (oh, yes, that will be soon) – watch www.lynwood-jewellery.co.uk and this blog for further details.

But first the beautiful and sublime, Peridot:

The Peridot gemstone is a gem version of the stone ‘olivine’ and the green colour of the Peridot stone is due to the iron content within the mostly magnesium based stone, Magnesium Silicate.  Apparently humans have been mining Peridot for over 4ooo years, which is a long time considering that takes us back to the bronze age. Peridot is found in Egyptian jewellery and was most likely one of  the gemstones of the famous Breastplates of the Jewish high priests.

Peridot is the birthstone of those born in August and is attributed with warding off nightmares, so then, highly appropriate as the stone that creates the iris of my Evil Eye Necklace!

Watch this space – and be nice to me!

By the way, the picture is the actual Peridot stone I will be using.