Day 48: Silversmithing

I completed the first class of my silver jewellery making course on Saturday. It was good fun but very difficult. It takes a lot of patience. A lot of my time was spent trying to file down strips of silver until they were perfectly straight so that when I bent the edges around to meet in the middle they would sit perfectly without any gaps.

I am making a Russian wedding band, which is a ring compiled of 3 rings that get soldered together. First I calculated the length my strips had to be for my ring size, I used a saw to cut the silver to size, filed each of the ends, bent them into a rectangle so the edges met, added a strip of silver to the rings and used a blow torch to solder the silver on and heat the rings so they became plyable, put the rings in an acidic solution and then into a bi carb mixture and then water and then banged the silver into a ring shape with a wooden hammer.

I got as far as banging 2 of the rings into shape. This Saturday I will be soldering the rings together and polishing the silver. There may be further steps too, I will find out soon! I am hoping to design my own piece of jewellery by the end of the 4 weeks. Below is the Pine Street studio in Chippendale, you can see my rings in the foreground. There was a great mix of people, all of which were at a much more advanced level to me as they had been doing the classes in previous terms. It was good to see the types of things I will hopefully be able to make in the future if I continue the classes.

My rings part way through the workshop and some of the tools I used

The studio and my rings at the end of one class