Messy desk a sign of creativity?

A colleague told me that. Let's hope she's right.

Metal rant

Lampwork and bronze ring

Copper is nice to weave and wrap with, but bronze has a low melting temperature, which means less headache when it comes to my torch. This ring is a combination of phosphor bronze wire and a gorgeous, luminous lampwork bead made by my Mom. You can visit her blog but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree in terms of blog maintenance. 

And now to meander through the vagaries of silver spot price history. It's pretty simple: when I started making jewelry about 13 years ago, silver was cheap. I mean, buy it, use it, cut it up without blinking cheap. I bought lots of it, used lots of it, and became very very spoiled. Since 2001 - when I started making jewelry - the silver spot price (google is your friend), has gone from $4.50 an ounce, all the way to a high of $48.00 an ounce before settling around $30.00 an ounce for most of the past three years. It's currently at a low of $22 but no one selling silver seems to have noticed. I'm no math wizz, but even I can figure out how much this sucks. I don't mind using it for myself and gifts, but it means making any profit off of handmade jewelry is basically impossible. And any prototypes have to be made in something else as the risk is just too great, even if you can sell silver scrap.

So, like many other jewelry artists, I started to look for other options. I love the coolness of silver, the way it feels when you work with it, it's strength and flexibility, how shiny it can be but also how lovely details pop when it's tarnished...Sigh. Silver plate is not an option, as far as I'm concerned. It's often plated copper and then I figure just use copper. Copper is actually growing on me. As I've already mentioned, it's easy to work with and I like the color when it's shiny and tarnished. There is no copper solder, though, so you have to use silver solder and plate over it with copper at the end.

Brass is, well, too brassy for my tastes. I never worked in gold because I'm just not a fan of yellow. Steel would break most of my tools and my fingers, so what else is there? Then I found phosphor bronze at wickwirejewelry.com. I was intrigued. Alright, it's kinda yellow. But also not really. It has a pinky/brownish tint that tones down the yellow. I can torch it. I can make big-balled head pins with large gauge wire (which is not possible with the copper). When it's been torched it turns the loveliest shade of pink and doesn't have to be put in a pickling solution (like copper). The only problem is, the stuff is tough. After breaking many a nail I discovered that it's used for piano and guitar strings. It can be annealed with a torch to make it more workable, but it's still difficult to bend, and my disc cutter hates it. It's also difficult to find metal beads and findings like cord ends to match.

So um, maybe someone will discover a way to make silver in a lab or something? Sigh.

Brass rings

Sometimes I wonder if I'm crazy to do so much of the fabrication myself. Making the band for this type of ring requires:

1. cutting a strip out of my brass sheet
2. sanding off the rough edges
3. annealing with my torch
4. running it through the embossing machine
5. punching a hole in the middle
6. bending the metal strip around a ring mandrel 
7. pickling to get the fire scale off 
8. tumbling to make it shiny

That's just the band, but the rest is easy. I look for a bead, nut and bolt that fits. Usually I need a metal disk as a kind of washer/bead cap. I make those out of sheet metal as well (which involves most of the same steps as the band). Crazy? Perhaps. But I have to justify purchasing all of those tools.