Cinnamon Jewellery

One of my New Year things was to start using up my rather large collection of cabs, including some cab shaped pearl beads I've had for years. So I made a start with these copper earrings. I rolled the copper through my rolling mill with a textured card to give it a lovely swirly pattern and combined the copper with pale pink pearl beads and a fine silver ball. The balls were a total pig to solder on as they kept wriggling around and refusing to solder on the flat side. I have no idea why they were doing this but after a bit of a battle I did get them soldered down in the end! The second pair I made used part of some really lovely sterling silver bracelet toggle fasteners. I remember buying these on ebay several years ago after ebay sent me a voucher. I can't remember why they sent me a voucher other than I was a seller on there at the time. Anyway I bought the flower toggle fasteners as I used to make strung bracelets at the time but never used them all so when I had ...

One thing that has always caught my eye when I look at metalwork jewellery is contrast and layers. That difference in texture between patterned and smooth and also the depth added by layers and overlaying. I recently tried etching sterling silver firstly using copper nitrate and a battery. It worked but the results were unpredictable. By that I mean some pieces etched well within an hour and the next batch were hardly touched after 4 hours. A bit frustrating and not reliable enough for someone who isn't the world's most patient soul! So I decided to try ferric nitrate which is a bit more "hardcore" than the previous method and one I'd been hoping to avoid. The sterling silver etched well with the ferric nitrate. I used vinyl/plastic stickers you can find in craft stores and left it for about 2.5 hours. The stickers worked well and the etch was really clean and quite deep.  These earrings were hard to photograph because of their shiny shiny nat...