YOJ Week 46: Star and Moon and finally... Week 9!!

Two weekends ago, I got a good session of metalsmithing in. yeah!!! The star and moon are courtesy of my Sister's home business.. she sells scrapebooking and paper art supplies. She's very good at it, her link is to the left in my links section. Anyway she's got die cutting gizmo's (it's called the big shot) for paper, so we experimented with using it to cut thin metal. We experimented with sterling silver in 24GA and 30GA, and copper in 24GA & 28GA. The 24Ga was a real reach, I want to try it with 26GA, I think that will be the perfect compromise between thin enough to cut properly and thick enough to do things with... Below is the first piece I've finished using the cutouts we made. The sterling moon is 30Ga which cut very well but I had trouble making this piece.. it's so thin one of the corners got clipped off, so I trimmed the bottom edge to match. Also using 30GA silver on 24GA copper is tricky, as the sterling wants to melt much faster than the solder did.. still I'm very pleased with this piece, and I think I"ll have to buy a die cutter or something, at least it's on my wish list. Anyway, I soldered the sterling moon on the 24GA copper star, polished the front to a mirror finish, and textured the back of the star, mostly cause I felt like it. The loop is 16GA half-round wire. Overall I'm very pleased how it turned out. I know some folks will think using a die cutter is "cheating" but honestly, I still had to do all the steps for making this a professional piece: filing, sanding, cleaning, soldering, sanding again, polishing and sometimes repeating all of that more than once to get the results you want. So the only short cut involved is the cutting/sawing of the piece. I really want to buy a gizmo!

I also made a heart pendant, a couple of rings, some headpins and .... .........................................................................................................................................................................................

I finally finished week 9!! Week 9 is the only week I've skipped, and that's because I started this project back in march, and then the show season started and I just never got back to it. Originally I had a very kewl concept for the theme " The hidden meaning", and I wanted to do it no matter what, so I skipped week 9 thinking I would get back to it alittle faster than November! First I love the stone in this pendant, and all along I wanted to keep it for myself. I was going to make a locket with this stone in front and have a picture on the inside, and have dangles coming down in front. The picture would be the hidden meaning. I had the stone oriented with the flat side down... anyway, when I picked it up anew 2 weeks ago, I realized how great this stone cab was, and it didn't need all that extra stuff to be mysterious... the stone itself has "hidden depths" especially if I flip it around and had the curve side down.. it makes me think of a cave with stalactite's and a creek in it and maybe goblins are going to pop out from behind a rook any second.... This stone is so pretty it didn't need any "gimmick " to make it sing. Now, I still fully intend to do a locket like that sometime, but not with this stone. So I went for a simple bezel... but I did do a tube for the bail and that turned out really well, I'm very pleased about that! Anyway, I'm now completely up to date with YOJ!