Finished Moonlit Water pendant

I've been working on a little piece which I've called either Moon Water or Moonlit Water, although I think I might have used the second version for a much earlier piece.
The piece uses white sea glass and silvery and white beads, both vintage and modern. I frequently use silver wire torcs to hang these pendants but I decided that this time I would make a beaded necklace.
(For people who think I've misspelled torc, that's the right spelling, torque has something to do with engines, sorry bit of a pet hate of mine)

This is very unusual for me, I actually drew a design for this piece, it's even turned out not too far from this!

Here's a very early stage of the piece, fixing the sea glass to a backing with rows of hand stitched beads.

This is the pendant finished, slightly out of focus sadly.

I've recently started using metals, fusing them together. So I decided to make a fastener for this piece out of silver wire.

The clasp is a T Bar style with a loop which the T bar fits through. It's made by twisting wire round itself and then fusing it with a blow torch. This wire was quite fine so I had to be careful not to just melt it. After cleaning the fused wire is hammered flat, this makes it much harder, work hardened.
In the top image you can see the mini anvil I use to hammer the shapes with a small modellers hammer.

Here's the finished piece on my work mat. I've added some embellishments to the simple beaded necklace, partly because it felt like it needed something, and also so that the pendant will sit with it's clasp visible at the side rather than at the back as usual. After all if it's such a nice fastener why hide it?
There are a some tiny baroque pearls in this piece which I found on an antique/junk stall, it's a great multi strand necklace so lots of pearls available.

Just a bit of a rambling catch up and new jewellery.

It's been a while since I wrote anything on here. Lots happened recently, first of all, and most exciting, I passed my driving test, took 2 and a half years and three attempts. Many thanks to my instructor, of infinite patience, Paul Troke

 All I need to do now is buy a car! That could take a while.

Secondly I took on the role of chair for the conservation group I belong to, only because we have to have one and everyone else was avoiding the question!

So far nothing too scary, just signing forms and supposedly chairing a meeting. 

Few bits of jewellery I've made recently:

This needs finishing a bit. silver wire melted onto copper heart.

Open Heart, simple silver and copper pendant.

This is a brooch I was commissioned to make for a friend. sea glass in the centre, czech glass flowers around it and a row of flourite beads with my usual vintage and modern seed beads. The pin is silver wire.

https://folksy.com/items/6597799-Silver-wire-and-Aventurine-Orbit-brooch

This is a new style of work, I had this idea running around my head for a while and I made it up as another suggestion for my frend's commission. Just silver wire wrapped around an Aventurine bead. The bead measures about 3/4" (2cm) long.

Magic 'Diamonds' from my metal cleaning solution.

I've been using cream of tarta,r in place of more usual solutions, to clean fire stain from my pieces after heating. Recently it's been much harder to buy in sensible quantities, I bought some from a local healthfood and baking supplies shop and it was obviously much better quality than I've bought before, I may have been buying the substitute version, or an adulturated version, previously as something has happened which never happened before.

These amazing crystals grew in the pot, I had made a solution a few days ago, maybe as much as a week, and wanted to use it again today, I stirred it with my finger to get the sludge off the bottom and found what appeared to be a piece of glass in there. Puzzled I pulled it out and found the largest crystal you can see on the left above.

At first I thought, broken glass, but I haven't broken anything recently and I live alone apart from the cat. Further investigation produced all these beautiful crystals.

Sadly they  will react with moisture and dissolve again eventually otherwise you can bet I'd find a way to make jewellery from them!

Apparently they will carry an electric charge and there's all sorts of stuff on the net about how to use them, none of the crystals I've seen there are as big or as beautiful, I did add lemon juice to make the solution a tad more acid, maybe that makes the difference?

I shall just admire them for now until they disappear.

Just beautiful

I'd appreciate any knowledgeable person giving me some more info about these beauties.

Meanwhile here's some of the work that I've made that needed to be cleaned

 

This is a bit of an experiment, I bought these copper stars and up to now I've made pendants just using one, I wanted to see if I could make something more complex, there's a bit of an industrial feel with the copper wire, because the silver is applied by melting with a blow torch the results are unpredictable so the earrings are not an exact match. I quite like that, hopefully others will too.

I call this one Planet, it has a sort of Jupitery, Saturny  feel to it. There are actually two stripes of silver wire but the top one was thinner and almost melted completely. 

These random effects are really lovely in my opinion. This one is domed slightly to give a more substantial feel to the piece. The chain is a recycled silver trace chain, bought from a collectors market with a fairly naff pendant on it which I discarded.

There are two new pieces soaking in the magic cream of tartar solution now, a heart and another disc.