Trials and Tribulations: Part 2 A New Start

I recently posted about how sometimes, when you make a piece of jewellery, even though it may have taken you a long time to do, the result may not be exactly what you want. So, you have to just , start again.

Well, I did: start again, that is. I took the necklace as mentioned in the post “The trial and tribulations of making handmade: hard decisions” and made it into something else.

I had a look at the necklace and realised that I could re-use the handmade links and turn them into three bracelets. To break up the necklace, I had to cut the wrapped silver from the green moss agate beads, however that went into my scraps pot for melting down at a  later date. The links however, were fully able to be re-used. From those links I created three bracelets. One from the green moss agate beads and two others using some, quite fabulous, black freshwater pearls that I just bought.

One of the black pearl bracelets will be sold by WowThankYOu on behalf of the Cystic Fibrosis Trust

So, in the end, what seemed like a large waste of time, ended up in a good result: three bracelets, one of which, the proceeds will go to charity.

Here’s a sneak preview of one of the pearl bracelets which will be going off to the Edinburgh Assay office for hallmarking shortly:

Black pearl bracelet

The Sun God Has Risen

At last, I have finished the necklace ‘Homage to the Sun God‘, see earlier post.

The final stages included soldering the rays to the surface of the Sun – ironically you seemed to need temperatures that normally are only found at the centre of the Sun to get the things to bond!

The problem being that the disc is made from thick sterling silver and so was acting like a heat sink, allowing the heat to flow away from the solder. Took some doing, but eventually the solder flowed and the rays became part of the Sun.

In the meantime, I also created a bezel cup in which to sit the heliodor beryl gemstone. I decided that I would sit the beryl unconventionally, upside down, to have the effect of the sun’s flames coming out from the belly of the Sun. The bezel cup was slightly sunk into the Sun disc to house the beryl.

After that the next most difficult part was to clean up the disc, as I couldn’t tumble it, as the bezel housing for he beryl is quite delicate, so it became very laborious and took a number of goes with varying grades of wet and dry and then finally very fine wire wool and soap, to make the Sun shine.

I then drilled a hole into the Sun disc from which the Sun hangs via a silver hook to the chain.

After that the beryl was fitted into the cup and the necklace was complete and the Sun finally rose.

Here are a few images of it. I’ll be listing it on Etsy and Folksy very soon. What’s particularly nice about this necklace is that it can be word with the Sun pendant or without a chain on its own. So you can have your crazy pendant days or your much quieter chain only days.

Homage to the Sun God

me wearing the Sun God

A Different View of the Sun God Necklace

A slightly different way to show off jewellery for sale: Deviant Art jewellery

A lovely woman I know on Deviant Art (nimue-morgan ) liked one of my necklaces (there’s a link below) and so she painted it onto one of her characters called Sundazzle and she has allowed me to use it to show off the necklace.

I think it’s a great and different way to show off a necklace or any other jewellery that’s for sale – what do you think?

Sundazzle wearing one of my necklaces