Cinnamon Jewellery

I've been making bangles for a few years now but have never thought about making cuffs until recently. Cuffs are very popular especially in copper as some people believe the copper helps with arthritis pain {although there's no scientific proof of this}. I decided to start making a couple of narrow copper cuffs to see how it goes and whether they sell. Copper cuff with hammered bark texture  Copper cuff with leaf vein texture I spent a stupid amount of time trying to work out the sizing of cuffs which isn't as simple as it might seem! I make them to fit the buyer's wrist size not a general 6 inch length piece of metal fits all approach {it doesn't}. After making a couple for myself I finally worked out how to get the sizing right. I haven't had any returns yet so the sizing must be ok....:D Soon after I started listing the cuffs I got a request from a buyer in France who had bought one of my copper poppy bangles .... She asked to return...

I love the look of twisted wire and thought I'd have a go at making a double twist copper bangle. I took a length of thinner gauge twisted copper wire I'd had hanging around for a while and decided to twist it together with a length of 3.25mm copper wire to make a round bangle.  As this bangle started off as just a practice piece I didn't pay too much attention to what gauge wire the thinner twist was but I think it was two pieces of 18g {1mm} that I'd twisted in my flexshaft. In order to twist the two pieces of wire together I was going to need to use my vice and a pair of locking pliers. I soon realized that the vice and the pliers weren't going to hold the two separate pieces of wire together securely due to the amount of tension produced as they were twisted so I needed to solder both wires together at either end to keep them in place.  Once I started twisting the two wires they soon became work hardened and I could feel the tension produced...

A few months ago I started having a strange problem. The solder joins on some of my 2mm bronze wire bangles started to split as I was making them. Three out of five of a set I was making split and I had to start them again.  Bearing in mind I sell a lot of bangles and have made hundreds of them without any solder join problems occuring before I was baffled. I also had a few solder join splitting occurances with 3mm bronze wire and 2mm copper wire. One of the joins on the 2mm bronze wire came open literally as I got the bangle out of the pickle pot and others would start to split when I put pressure on the join either by rounding the bangle on the mandrel or by hammering it on the mandrel. I thought about what I was doing differently..... but I wasn't doing anything differently from how I made all my other bangles! I use wire ranging from 1.8mm up to 5mm in copper, bronze and sterling silver. The process is the same - cut the wire, file the ends flat using a mitre jig, b...