After the learning, the doing

Last week I was the happy recipient of some excellent one-to-one silverwork tuition. This led, of course, to an online shopping trip to get some new soldering kit so I could practice my new-found skills. So, when the box of lovely stuff arrived, I went to my workshop and decided it really needed some serious reorganisation, not least because too much stuff increases the chances of knocking things over, setting fire to debris and so on. Not good, but easily remedied via a tidying-fest.

My workshop (before) - lots of stuff, no space to do anything!

My workshop (after) - rubbish in the bin, materials reorganised and stored, new jewellery space set up. Hurrah!

So, I now have a nifty little selection of new tools, our unused dust-gathering slow-cooker is now the pickling vat (non-ferrous inside to avoid those nasty iron ions!), and I already had other bit and pieces like the quenching tub and some silver sheet. Time to saw, file, polish and solder...

Pendant being cleaned/pickled. Nothing ferrous to be dipped in here - those horrid iron ions again.

Joining multiple pieces of silver was a good test of using the different grades (easy, medium, hard) of solder with their different melting points. Starting with 'hard' then moving towards 'easy' means that the pieces soldered first aren't heated so much they drop off when the other pieces are attached. After cleaning, some polishing - not too much as I like the organic/industrial feel of a lot of what I make (plus I'd fiddled with the texture of the surface to make it ever-so-slightly stippled) - and a ring added, gave my first post-training pendant.

Silver pendant full of lovely soldering.

I'm quite pleased with it to be honest, especially as my first silver-soldered piece without instruction. It will be interesting to see how my designs develop - I use a lot of steel so will need to be careful not to contaminate the pickle, and thus combining steel and silver won't be straightforward, but I have experiments in mind and new pieces will be coming soon.