Ok, not to sound overly arrogant, but I am sooo happy with how my things turned out. I cranked out two pairs of earrings and two rings in two days. So, while making my first pair of earrings that you see below, I encountered a lot of trouble. The bezels that go around the stones do not have backs. This means that you have to close one side of the bezel and then set the stone in it and then close the other side. Well...to say the least I had a hard time doing this. The bezel has to be an exact fit around the stone, otherwise it wiggles around inside the bezel. My bezels were not a perfect fit. So, I had to hammer, file, and tap for hours to get my bezels to fit. If you can see the roughness of the bezels on the stones you are looking at the small remainder of what I could not hide. It is alright though because it goes with the earrings. Anyway, after hours of tedious, and very very frustrating work I had one bezel finished and I was soldering the jump ring onto the second when it melted!!! I mean the thing just collapsed into a small vibrating glob of red hot silver. The bezels were so thin that the torch heated them up very quickly. So, I had to start my perfect bezel over. Eventually it got done and I finished the earrings. It was cool though because I have never made hoops before. So I totally improvised my hoops and they turned out great!

The next piece is the pair of pearl earrings. I like these because they aren't conventional in the fact that the bezels aren't closed. This way the white of the pearl reflects on the silver and casts a certain glow in the right lighting. In this picture you see the shadow that the open bezel creates. There is no risk of the stones falling out because they are set snug in their bezels. These were pretty simple to make, thankfully. I did melt anything or make my bezel too small so it was a smooth ride with these. It was fun though because I have never made studs before!

I am proud of all three of my pieces, but this ring I am most proud of. I had to made the bands for each ring, then made bezels for the stones. This process was different because they are faceted into a taper at the end.

With gems like these you have to set the stone on a filed edge so the point of the gem does not rest on the bottom of the bezel.

This means that you have to use an electric powered bur to file out a seat for the gem on an already thin bezel. Luckily I didn't encounter any problems with this part besides a lack of patience. I then set the bezels on the rings and soldered them. I then set the stones in their bezels and pushed the edges over. This takes longer than you think because, despite the smallness and thinness of the bezels, the silver is very hard to manipulate when the bezel is so small. So I eventually got that done and I did the usual buffer job. They look a little rough in this picture, I don't know why because they are actually very smooth. All in all though I am very very proud of this piece!

Lastly, these earrings I had made previously out of PMC. They were originally flat and had a very cloudy finish. So, I dapped them (meaning I rounded the flatness out) and I polished them. By simply doing these two things there is a world of a difference.

Although I am proud of my other rings, this is my favorite that I have made so far. It is simple and it has a very good weight to it. I discovered that I can melt down the PMC that I have and use it just like normal silver. So, I melted down some old rings that I had made years ago, that I didn't really like anyway, and I poured them into an ingot. I then milled down the blob of silver, aniling it every four times it went through the mill. I had to put the piece through the mill about thirty times, so you do the math. When you anil it ensures that the silver won't crack when you mill it down.

Silver gets very hard and stubborn when you work with it too much. So, when this happens and you do not anil the silver it will crack and then you have to start over. So, when you anil you have to heat the piece until it is glowing red and then keep it red for about a minute, without melting the silver. Anyway, after milling it down to the correct size and thickness I cut it and soldered it together. I then tapped it using a small, rounded, metal hammer to get the pock marks.

Today I worked on a new ring. It is going to be a three part ring. Each band will have it's own bezeled gem on it. I made the bezels and the bands today. All I have left to do is solder the bezels to the rings and set the gems in the bezels. I am also making a pair of pearl earrings. They are not conventional ones that are glued to a holder. They are cabochon pearls, meaning they look like a sphere cut in half. They are going to be set into bezels and then attached to posts. The bezels with their back plates have already been soldered together, so all I have left to do with those is to attach the posts and set the pearls in the bezels. OH and I also made bezels for a pair of tear drop green gems. These will have bezels around them but no back plate. I am going to hang them off of hoops, hopefully it works out how I imagine.

So... I got a ton done today because in addition to those I made a bracelet for my Aunt Biff. She asked me to make it for her this summer when I was at RISD, but I didn't have time. So, I made her the bracelet she wanted, but she has to wait to get it because I am going to use it in my photo shoot. This is the unfinished product. It needs some more filing and polishing.

Here is a diagram of everything I have been talking about with my stone rings:

So, I finally finished my round stone ring. After the solder seam on the bezel cracked on Friday, I made another bezel. This was tricky because it had to be the exact same thickness and size as the previous bezel, since I had already attached the back plate, for the bezel, to the ring. So, I made the new bezel and luckily didn't cut it too short or file it too much. Now the whole thing is soldered. I spent a lot of the day making the bezel and attaching it, and then doing the usual file, sand, and polish. If you are wondering why this is necessary it is because when you work with silver it gets very scratched and marred. From pliers and other tools there are often little makings that need to be cleaned up. To do this you file the silver down so that the mark isn't there anymore. After this you have to go through four grits of sand paper, ranging from coarse to fine, and gradually make the surface smoother. Then you move onto polishing, which is the last form of buffer. The polishing is my favorite part because when you are working on a ring it tends to look very beat up and marred. When you are done with the buffer process it takes away all the ugly spots and gives you a beautiful ring.


The ring below is a ring made of Precious Metal Clay (PMC). Working with this material is just like working with clay except that it dries out much quicker and it is infused with silver. All one has to do is shape the clay how they want it, fire it, and there you have a silver ring. When it is fired all of the clay compound fires out and all you are left with is silver. The problem with PMC is that it does not have a nice polished finish like normal silver does. So, since I have the resources, I have been polishing and refining my PMC rings to have the polished finish that regular silver rings do.

YAY! I made a ring with a stone set in it! The turquoise ring is all done. It is bezeled, soldered, filed, sanded, burnished, and polished. The circular stone ring is another story. I was 98.5% done with the whole thing and the solder seam cracked. The solder seam is where you join two ends together. With a band you cut a straight piece of wire and bend the ends around until they meet, and that is where you solder. As you already know, the two ends that meet have to be completely flush, so that when you hold it up to the light nothing shows through the crack. So, I had everything soldered together. The band was complete, the bezel was complete, and they were soldered together. I had filed, sanded, burnished, and polished. I set the stone in the perfectly measured bezel and it fit wonderfully. However, when I was tapping the edges of the bezel around the stone the solder seam of the bezel cracked, and now I have to completely start the bezel over. I have to draw out more wire and flatten it, then bend it and shape it until it is a perfect fit. Then I have to solder it together and then solder that to the back piece that is already on the ring. Then, if my solder is strong enough I will be able to finish the ring. But, oh well... I finished one ring and I am proud of it. I also worked on a ring I had made this summer. I finished soldering it together and polished it up to a mirror shine. So I made it through the day without breaking down from frustration, but my hands are another story. Blistered, cut, and bruised, they look like jewelers hands. :)

I worked on two different rings today. One is a faceted round stone and the other is an oval shaped turquoise. The round stone ring is all soldered together. The bezel for the stone, the back on the bezel, and the band for the ring are all soldered together. It took me about three times to get it right because of small imperfections that can screw up the whole piece. For those of you that have never soldered, which I am assuming is all of you, the seams that you solder together have to be completely flush. It sounds like a simple task but it takes hours! While making my band for the ring I accidentally cut the band too short and had to change how the it attached to the bezel. This tacked on another hour and a half to my ring. Anyway, after lots of help from Arturo and Julio, I was able to solder the ring together. Now all I have left to do is file it, polish it, set the stone in it, and tap the metal around the stone so it stays.
The other ring, the oval turquoise ring, is not quite as far. I have all of the pieces assembled and the bezel for the stone fits, which is not an easy task. I made sure to cut the band for this one the right length. So, tomorrow I will solder the whole thing together and go through the same process as the other ring. Hopefully I finish tomorrow and you will get to see the finished pieces! Oh and Arturo felt bad for me so he hooked me up with my own torch and soldering board so that I wouldn't have to keep asking Lara to use hers.

Today I got to start on setting my stone for my first ring. I took a turquoise bead that I had and had one of the jewelers (Arturo) teach me how to grind it down so that it was a cabochon. So I ground my bead down until it was half the thickness it had initially been. Then I took some of the silver in my box and melted it down to make a bezel wire. The bezel making process takes about two hours to do because it is to tedious. You have to work the glob of silver into a wire by forcing it through an electric mill. Then after about three runs through the mill you have to anil the wire so that it is still maleable. Silver gets very hard from bending and shaping so you have to make it soft so that it won't crack when you work with it. So getting the wire down to the width and length that I needed took me about two hours but it got done. Then I had to fit the wire around the turquoise cab and solder it (without the stone in it of course). So, now I have my bezel, and tomorrow I will solder my bezel onto a back and solder that onto a half round band. Then I will set my stone in the bezel and bend the edges around it to hold the stone in. Then VOILA we have ourselves a ring, of course after I file, sand, burnish, and polish it (all of which takes about half a day). Who knew that making jewelry took so long?!

Unfortunately, yesterday, I came down with the 24 hour flu so I didn't get to come into the shop. However, I made up for it today. Lara and I made a rustic hammered bracelet with bezeled garnets on it. In normal people terms, we made a hammered bracelet with ruby red stones on it. So, I learned how to make a bezel for a stone. Tomorrow I get to start on my own rings and earrings. I am sooo excited to start my own designs. The shop at Barry Peterson's is unbelievable. It has so many cool tools that buffer, grind, sand, bend, and heat. I have never seen so many different kinds of tools in my life. So, tomorrow I get to start my own creations using these amazing tools, and I get to take my jewelry making to a whole new level!

My first week of jewelry making went over smoothly. I've been helping my mentor, Laura, make suns for the store. My soldering skills were a little out of whack but they've come back thankfully. Next week I am going to start making my own rings and setting stones in rings. Unfortunately, I am not going to be able to cast my own rings because the process takes a lot longer than I thought it would. Depending on how quickly I work we will see how things turn out. Otherwise everything is going smoothly and I am refreshing old skills and learning new ones every day.