I'm baaaaack ;)

Well, I haven't visited here for a while. And it's all fault of that adorable little creature:

The culprit!

This is Luna, and she's a weimaraner puppy, 5 months and 2 weeks old. And doing anything with her around was rather difficult until recently. Obviously, I can't take her with me when I work, and she wasn't very good about staying on her own. Fortunately, however, she finally seems to realise that spending some time by herself isn't the end of the world, and that she shouldn't try to eat camera tripod when I'm taking pictures, so I'm back to jewellery making. Unfortunately, I totally missed the Christmas-shopping period almost completely :( Oh, well... By the way, that's how she looked when we first got her:

Give me a moment to squee at my own dog ;P

Ok, now for the jewellery stuff...
I got a bunch of lovely stones, finally decided to get some silver sheet, and also got some pewter to practice casting a bit.
The first two things I made with my new cabochons are mixed metal pendants with bronzite. Until very recently I didn't even know bronzite existed, and now it's became one of my favourite stones. It's awfully pretty!

Running wolf mixed metal pendant

Background is made from copper, trees are bronze, and the wolf is sterling silver. The stone (isn't it lovely?) is prong set into a copper "bracket"- the metal part doesn't extend on the back of it - mostly because I wasn't sure I would manage to solder all those little prongs next to one another and wanted to save myself the time and trouble.

This is how it looks like on the back. Generally speaking, I'm pretty happy with it, only I wasn't able to file one of the wolf's paws as much as I would like: it's tiny, and the file couldn't reach everywhere it should've.
And the second pendant:

Fox and tree pendant

The metals sequence is the same here: copper on the back, then bronze, and then silver. After soldering the fox, I decided that its snout is still too wide, but there's nothing I can do about it now. Anyway, the fox was a pain to saw, file, and finish, because it's teeny-tiny: only 1.3cm long, and 0.5cm tall. Terrible.

Back looks the same as with the previous one. I was worried I wouldn't like the look, but it's actually not bad.
Both pendants come with 51cm/20in sterling silver chain.
I have three more bronzite cabochons, three rainbow moonstones, two labradorites (finally got my hands on some!), and a string of lovely peacock pearls. I'm really excited about working with those!

Apart from these pendants, I also made bat earrings, combined with an ear cuff:

Bat earrings

 By  the way, I'm actually really pleased with that picture! There's a surprise.
They're rather delicate, the bats being 1.3cm wide and 1cm tall. The earrings are 4cm long (without counting ear wires).

And that's how the one with the ear cuff looks like when worn. Not the best picture, but enough to get you idea. I really like them, and probably will make a pair for myself :D

And finally, there are also two new cuffs ( I really like making those!)
One's with an Eurasian Lynx:

And the other with a reindeer:

And that one really surprised me, because it sold not even a full day after I uploaded it to my shop! I could definitely do with more of surprises of this kind!

I hope I'll be back soon with more new stuff: I have several designs ready, now I only need to make them into reality :)

Have a great day!
Kasia

Drilling through titanium is not so scary, after all!

Remember I've got some titanium and was having loads of fun flame-colouring it, and a bit less fun wearing saw blades down like crazy? Well, I've finished one pendant (the other one is aaaalmost finished).
What I really feared was drilling holes for rivets. I ordered diamond drill bits to do the job, but was still quite apprehensive about the whole process. I even invented a very high-tech cooling set-up for drilling... namely: yoghurt container with thickly folded paper and enough water to keep the piece submerged. Oh and there was also plasticine layer to weight the paper down. High-tech, I tell you!
As it turned out, drilling was pretty easy. I fell in love with diamond drill bits, and would happily use them for anything, if only the weren't so expensive!
I also promptly broke one, but that wasn't titanium fault, it was all me.
Oh, I also bought rotary tool with flexishaft, and I absolutely love it! I makes drilling (and engraving) much easier!
The finished piece looks like this:

Copper and titanium wolf pendant

Placing the rivets was a little tricky, especially on the side with the pierced out moon. That's why the rivets are not evenly spaced.  I first drilled through copper alone, then taped both metals together, and drilled through titanium placing drill bit in holes in copper.

Back

The copper part is of course oxidised, as well as etched. The rivets are a bit chunky on the back of the pendant, because I decided to make balls at the ends of the wire, and them hammer them flat. That was less because of design choice, and more because I wanted to make my life easier, and have just one side of the rivet to worry about ;)

That photo captures colour better

It was a fun piece to make! I'm now (vaguely) planning to make some earrings out of leftover titanium, and maybe one more pendant(if there will be enough of the metal left for that). I also don't know what I did differently the second time I was sawing titanium, but I actually used up one less blade for a slightly bigger piece.
My thoughts on that metal so far: it gives interesting colour options, is very light, so it's great for earrings, and allows to make bigger pieces that will still be light, sawing it is a pain, as probably is forming it ( I didn't try that, but I'm guessing based on its hardness), drilling through it isn't a real challenge when you have diamond drill bits and go slow. You also can't solder it, so you can go creative with cold connections. Guessing by the drilling process, and the fact that the drill doesn't seem dulled or worn, you can probably engrave it with diamond engraving bits. That's one thing I'm going to try!

It's an interesting material to work with, and I'm going to experiment with it a bit more :)

Till the next time!
Kasia Follow my blog with Bloglovin