New Designs '08

Here's just part of how busy I've been for the last 4 weeks, A nice display of a variety of Australian Opal Jewelry in Fine Silver.... All of it, every jumpring and link and wrap minus 2 pendants which are just sterling.

Hopefully I've met the customers needs

Diamond wire saw

I needed the capability to cut small opal and my Inland saw was pretty useless due to the huge diamond blade. So I stripped a few parts from it, bought a piece of clear plexi-glass and built a new frame, Ordered a .35mm diamond loop blade for $52 shipping included. I figured since I couldn't afford $5000.00 for a new saw from MTI, I bought their replacement blade and made my own. I've got one part to build for the upper pulley and it controls the tracking, I cut grooves in the wheels to hold the blade in position and replaced the Inland springs with a lighter set. It's coming along nicely.

Making Jumprings

Using a needle file handle, wrap the wire around and keep the wraps snug.

Then I slide them off and take my cutters and cut a straight line down the coil, I usually cut 4-5 at a time.

I lightly harden them with a small hobby hammer and they are ready to use.

Heart Pendant

Here's one I thought I would try and it came out pretty well. I Love the lines and the arrangement has so many options to choose from.

Custom Chains

With special thanks going to Linda Chandler and Christine Ritchy and Linda Jones for their books that help so much. I decided it was time to wrap more than just pendants, chains too. I feel that will be a nice benefit to the customer and make that piece of jewelry even more personal. So back to the chain, here's a picture at my first attempt

The instructions for doing this were very simple and very well illustrated. I'll try to get some more done, I just moved and getting the new shop setup, I'll unpack later.

Mold making for the polymer metal clay

The goal of this forum topic is to demonstrate a process of creating a usable mold and to hopefully show some examples and different kinds of material that will work well together. I will be using a polymer metal clay to fill the molds. The molds at first will be made of clear casting resin from castin'craft. Smaller trinkets, older jewelry pieces will be tried at first. The next post will be about 3 weeks away.

I finally got the clay ordered....just a few more days.