Metalsmithing.. back at it

After a 3 year hiatus from making jewelry, I've decided to take it back up again - it is really my true passion - I love the process from start to finish and seeing what grows from my hands and mind is always a surprise and wonder.

I've started taking classes again with my old instructor Adam Clark - who is actually an amazing artist that i draw so much inspiration from. Because of him I have been able to make creations that I never knew I was capable of making. So I am excited to be in his class again. This session, I will be focusing on making a series of silver cuff-bracelets that are inspired by the iron door gates in and around San Francisco. So the foundation for my bracelets will be silver wire that I mold and form into these unique shapes..some of them will be symmetrical, others more organic and I may also play with hammering or rolling them to create flatness or different effects.

This last Wednesday, I spent most of the time in class recycling old silver scraps that i had accumulated. The process involved first melting all of the scraps in a ceramic crucible - once the silver was liquid - i took the crucible and poured it into a cast iron mold that created an ingot about the width of a pencil and about 5 inches long.

Once I had the ingot, my next step was to then roll it into wire. You have to take the ingot and thread it through various notches back and forth on the machine - after about 4 pass-throughs the metal will start to harden and need to be annealed. Silver is pretty malleable but will get hard the more contact it has with other metals or if it is hammered (there is a more scientific explanation that I'll dig up some day). That's why annealing is important - you basically heat the silver again and get it to the point where it is soft enough to work.

After about 1 hour of pulling wire through this machine I had about 8 feet of wire less than a millimeter wide. However the machine does not make the wire perfectly circular so it needed to be pulled again, this time through a draw-plate that made the wire round, shiny even smaller in diameter. I haven't measured it but I probably have about 12 feet of wire which I imagine should be good for at least 3 cuff bracelets if not more.

I haven't fully decided which design to do first but I'm thinking this symmetrical design will look cool as a bracelet.