Moon tree pendant and a feedback (finally!)

First and foremost: a bit late happy new year!

I had a really lazy Christmas and New Year break, and couldn't get myself back to work for a while ;P But I managed to stop doing... pretty much nothing ( well, that's not really true: I was reading. Copiously ) and made first ever pendant with bezel setting :) And I'm pretty happy with the result, even though I spent, I think, close to 6 hours working on said bezel - getting it to the right height required a lot of work, but it was worth it.

  And here it is. As I said, I really like how it turned out, even if it has a tendency to do weird things while photographed: like leaning to the side or twisting when suspended. And the stone is moonstone, by the way.

 

I shaped the pendant itself form art clay silver, and after drying it and firing, soldered on that bezel. I also made a bit of a mistake just after quenching and drying it... I wanted to make sure the bezel didn't get lopsided or... squished during placing and soldering it, so I put the stone in to see if it still fit inside... I wanted to drill a hole and cut an opening on the back, so the stone would have more light, but I didn't do it before placing the stone ( and I would like to point out that the piece was still not pickled and not oxidised at that point).

 Well, as it turned out, the bezel was still a good fit. Too good. The stone went in smoothly, but I couldn't get it out. I ended up drilling that hole in the back... by hand. I was holding the drill bit in my hand, and was really glad that it was fine silver, and not some harder metal. It took somewhere between half an hour and an hour, I think. 

After that, I was so glad to have the stone out, that I pickled and oxidised the pendant, polished it, and started setting the stone in place, and just then I realized that I didn't cut out the planned opening. So there is awkward hole on the back of the pendant instead of fancy cut out ;P But it served its purpose: the gave the stone more light while I was taking photos.
As it is a pendant, it won't matter while someone is wearing it - people, in general, are not translucent ;P

So that's about the pendant ( available here, by the way ) and now for something really nice for me:
finally, a customer who bothered with leaving feedback! Yay! She gave me 5 stars, and said this:
 "Beautiful! I love it and wear it all of the time. The craftsmanship is great. I look forward to buying from this artist again."

It's so cool to read something like that :D Also, I knew the item arrived safely - nice feeling, as opposed to wondering if it arrived, if the customer was happy, etc.

Till the next time!
Kasia