Cinnamon Jewellery

My recent sterling silver bangle-fest where I made quite a lot of silver bangles for hallmarking in various designs made me want to make something similar in copper. I really enjoyed making the stamped silver bangles on the right in this photo... I hadn't done any stamping for a while and it reminded me how much I like doing it. When I say stamping I mean creating patterns from mostly circle and line stamps rather than the inspiring words/phrases/childrens names that are so popular. I can't stamp letters in a straight line and making that style of jewellery has never appealed to me at all. So I stick to making patterns. I also made three copper bangles with a leaf vein texture using leaf skeletons. I used some 4mm {6g} round copper wire which I annealed then ran through the rolling mill a few times to flatten it. After annealing the flattened wire again I ran it through the rolling mill with the leaf skeletons, holding them in place with my fingers as they g...

I made my first copper bangle at college night class a few months ago as I had some thick gauge copper wire and I wasn't sure what to make so thought a bangle sounded like a good idea. Here's my first attempt... I soldered the coils on at home but before I did that I made a nice lot of noise at college hammering the bangle to give it some texture. Hammering's fine, it's just the noise it makes when you hammer a bangle on a metal bracelet mandrel! I didn't make anymore at college as I thought the hammering noise was probably annoying the others in the class...... I did carry on making more at home though once I'd got my own bracelet mandrel. The ringing noise created by the hammering on the mandrel really grates, drives my cats a bit mad and I'm still waiting for my neighbour to ask if I'm running some sort of foundry or something. I tried putting a sock over the mandrel with the bangle on top of the sock but it didn't make any difference an...

I finished my first "proper" copper hollow form pendant last week. I say proper as I'd made 1.5 practice pendants beforehand to get the feel of doing them. The half was my first attempt and it went ok up to the point where I pierced out the hole in the centre after soldering the first piece of sheet to the frames. After piercing out the hole I then for some reason started to pierce out the rest of it which would have left me with basically the frames again (!) I did realize my mistake quite quickly............. My second attempt went much better apart from quite a few gaps in the solder seam on both sides despite soldering one side FOUR times! Resoldering one area to fill the gap caused some other areas of solder to reflow and the solder to run off completely leaving even more gaps! I quickly decided I needed something to hold the frames and flat sheet together so the join was tighter and ordered some T pins...........  First attempt....... looks ok-ish from thi...