Back after ridiculous time away

Well, I haven't written anything on here for an insane amount of time, so here's a short hello.
I've been doing a lot of stuff fusing silver to copper, making pendants. Having spent a lot of time making intricate beaded jewellery this technique is a really great antidote.
Recently I experimented with making a bowl. For the jewellery I use pre-cut shapes as they are really very well priced and I couldn't make them myself for the same amount, but for the bowl I needed to cut the shape by hand, this was easier than I thought, takes a little care as the blades are very fine and break easily.
I used a pair of long silver earrings bought from a second hand market, very 80s. It's very small bowl as I only have a little doming block to make the bowl in.
Here it is, not completely finished in these pictures, needed a little more polishing.

Not too bad for a first attempt I thought.

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.

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.

Finally getting round to this one, copper and silver star set.

I have had these 5 brass and copper stars around for quite a while, I fused the silver onto them with the intention of making a necklace and earrings. Several months ago to be honest.

That's a very old laminated table top. had a lot of stuff thrown at it over the years.

As you can see I've finally linked three of them to start the necklace.

The reason for leaving it so long was the fear of drilling holes in those narrow points!
I have done it before, but only one hole, I don't have a drill stand, just a little cheap modelling tool.

Here it is in action.

Without a stand to lower the drill precisely down onto the piece the sliding around is really hard to control, I found that making a small dent in the surface with a tack (I'm sure there are more professional ways to do that)  helped, I developed a technique starting with the drill in the dent and switched off, then turned to it's slowest setting and gradually turning up the speed.
You need three hands really, I taped the pieces to the wood with masking tape and held the wood still with my right hand,  I had to use part of that hand to steady the drill too its a complicated manoeuvre. I actually had the wood on the heating block you can see on the table, (bit of  a staged shot that, drill not switched on and a hole already drilled).
So right wrist braced against the edge of the block, thumb and 3rd and 4th fingers holding the wood, 1st and 2nd fingers against the side of the drill near the chuck, left hand holds and operates the drill at the same time, phew what a way to work. Don't recommend it but worked for me.

Well eventually got all the holes drilled, the wire linking them is copper wire twisted and then fused, again a tricky job as I didn't want to heat the stars or melt the untwisted wire loops through the holes, I use this stuff to try to prevent that:

Its a thick paste which coats where you don't want the heat. Not 100% but pretty good.

Here are the earrings, not an exact match of course, not possible with this technique, you can see the raw copper wire before melting/fusing. On the right you can see how well the paste has preserved the star while I was fusing the wire link. You can also see where the drill has made a total mess of the bottom point of the left hand star, will have to see what I can do with that.

Heating the copper to melt and fuse the twists, you can just make out the grey blob of  Technoflux paste to the left of the flame, unfortunately I foolishly forgot the loop at the other end, it's burnt through so I shall have to redo this bit! My excuse is that I was getting rather tired, it was after 7pm and I'd been at it for a couple of hours or more.
 Well there you go I will have to look into getting a little drill stand sometime, if there's one that will fit my little drill. (It came from Lidl in case anyone wonders, very cheap and very reliable, my more expensive cordless one doesn't have variable speed! Amazing shop, keep an eye out they're bound to have them again sometime)

I'll post again when the set is finished.

Day out at Westward Ho!

Bit of a grotty day after all that lovely unexpected sun recently, we had decided to go to Westward Ho!, well known as the only place with punctuation as part of it's name. We realised that we'd never been there, despite living here for 7 years and having visited the West Country loads of times on holiday.
It's a nice Victorian village, with a broad sandy beach, it has a pebble ridge behind the beach which is probably part of the sea defences. There are plans to 'do up' the village a bit with a nice revamped green behind the beach, nice modern seating and lots of glamorous sea front apartments.
Being awkward types we walked along the pebbly, rather' bouldery', bit on the left hand side of the beach,

Wonderful row of wooden posts on the Westward Ho! beach.

 which becomes ridges of slatey rocks leading out to sea. There's a nice tidal swimming pool in the rocks, where we watched a black Labrador having a lovely swim!
After lunch in a nice little cafe we walked along the prom towards Abbotsham Cliffs, very windy but rather a nice walk. We didn't make it as far as the cliffs themselves, perhaps we'll go back one day and walk a bit further.
At the end of the village, standing alone on the edge of the cliffs, is a terribly sad old house, it looks Edwardian or late Victorian, and is completely neglected and falling to bits, lots of lovely stained glass all getting vandalised by stone throwers. It's all marked as private keep out and there appears to be a camera in one of the windows! What a waste of a lovely building, there's rusty scaffolding on it in places so maybe someone is trying to bring it back to life. ( After some research turns out this is Seafield House)

Walking back along a concrete covered pipe I discovered that this is a fabulous source of Anomia Cepa shells, otherwise known as Jingle shells, they are a variety of small clam which live attached to the shells of other sea creatures or to rocks, even to each other if no other surface presents! This means that their shapes vary considerably,so much so that they were called Anomia, meaning nameless, as they look so different from each other. I've found a few on my local beach at Ilfracombe but we found loads at Westward Ho!, they seem to have a thicker shell than the ones I've found before but they have great colours and are really iridescent both on the outside and inside.

Here's today's hoard soaking in soapy water to get the sea off them! Aren't they pretty!

I have two pieces of jewellery made with these shells so far.

Messing about with silver

I was trying to get a bit further with all the projects I have going at the moment.
The first job was a clearing up session to try to get a working area. During this process I found a little cheap St Christopher pendant I aquired when I bought a second hand chain. Well since he isn't officially a saint any more I decided to melt him. It's a fairly nasty little pendant anyway, (sorry if you have one like it)

 Here's the original little pendant, about the size of a 5p and very thin, with an embossed image, which is not much clearer than that close up.

Here's the melted result, I'm quite pleased that I've managed to keep the little hanging loop. I like the colours on the reverse, I doubt if I'll be able to keep those if I want to clean the rest, I'll give it a try though.

I've actually combed some of the fleece, I bought two 'slicker' combs for dogs from Wilkos (wilkinsons for the uninitiated) for about £3.50 each rather than about 10 times that for proper carding combs. I've also started making the body for one of the paper puppets. The paper rabbit has a coat of gesso ready for decorating. I've really got to concentrate on one project at a time.

As a complete side issue how about this jackdaw posing for me in the local churchyard last week.

Oh and here's a slow worm who visited last sunday.

In the background you can see a clutter of moulds and deckles, a bowl of pulp and the paper rabbit, just to prove I'm working hard.