Silver Forest

It's been a while, but I have dusted off my whittling fingers to dabble in the art of locket making.

With the teaching skills of Jan Preece at Hatton Studios in Hong Kong, I turned this tree design I made for a pendant into a locket. I think it's also a pretty cool design for cufflinks as well. The lesson was a good challenge as it involved some mind bending, fine balance soldering acts to create the hinge. Really honing my skills as a novice jewellery Jedi, I also got to make the 2mm thick hinge tube from scratch. This brought on the clarity that Jedi buy their tube at the supply store instead of sweating over it for 5 hours! A valuable lesson nonetheless as I have never appreciated tubes more than I do now. To define the multi layering of trees I experimented with a Liver of Sulfur patina, which colours the silver. In my first attempt I painted the staining solution directly onto the back trees. The solution cooled and dried quickly, creating unattractive splotches and gaps. I decided to brush this layer off with a rough brush, leaving a lightly stained matt finish, I then heated the entire locket in a pan, and gave it a quick second dip in the staining solution. To my amazement the L.O.S. created a patina of brown and blue! I polished the remaining patina off from the top layer of trees and the rest of the locket, and am quite pleased with the results. I have seen some lovely black coatings on silver jewellery recently, but how these are created is a mystery which I need to further explore.

#Patina #Locket #pendant #LiverOfSulfur #Silver #LOS #Patination