Metalsmithing Process
Reflections at Moonrise Earrings
When I am designing a new piece of jewelry, I often take inspiration from other people's work. This is a really good way of fixing ‘artist block’. ‘Artist block’ is something that every artist experiences.It is when the ideas stop flowing and you can’t think of what to create. It’s an extremely frustrating occurrence, especially when you are pressured to make art to sell or for school. When this happens to me, I go through instagram or pinterest, I find new artists and new styles that I like and that inspire new ideas. I never copy an artist's work, I may take a technique that they use or try to recreate a piece to practice, but none of my final pieces are recreations of other people's work.
For this piece I combined the styles of several artists and pieces that I found. With these new techniques and designs, I added my inspiration: travel and landscape. The first, second and third of these melted landscapes look completely different from the end design that I have stuck with. If I were to show you my inspiration, you may not even see a correlation between them. But sometimes, something very small can inspire an entire series of work.
The hardest part about making this piece was learning to control the melting of the silver. The idea of these pieces is that you see a reflection, this means that I had to create two melted pieces that reflected one another. I do not have a proper torch which makes being precise nearly impossible. But I eventually found a strategy that works most of the time, and if it doesn’t work, then I melt it back down and start over. The landscapes in each of these pieces is made from recycled silver. Sometimes I use my old jewelry or mistakes, and sometimes people give me their old silver to melt down and use.
Melted Landscape Charm
These pieces were a result of the ‘Reflections at Moonrise Earrings’. I wanted to make a charm version of these earrings, and I had many small bits of melted silver left over from creating them, so I created these charms. This process is very similar to ‘Reflections at Moonrise’, but smaller and with fewer steps. But, just because something is smaller, doesn’t always make it easier. In fact, sometimes it is the opposite.
Ceramic Stone Earrings
This was a very fun collection to make but it came with its challenges. Combining these materials felt natural and I am very excited to continue adding to this collection. I loved the process of making the ceramic stones. They were effortless, in a way, with no rules for how the shapes look or how big the pieces are, just peaceful work. However, when it came to making the silver cage, the word frustration comes to mind. I really like the design and I had never seen a bezel (the piece that holds the stone) work from both sides of the piece quite like these do, but maybe there is a reason for that. To start, these kinds of bezels (maybe they are called prong bezels?) are very difficult for me to make with the torch I have. I work with a torch that has a very large flame and very little heat control. This makes melting silver very easy, but for this piece, I really don’t want the silver to melt. Besides consistently melting my pieces after hours of work, I would cut the prongs a little too short and the stone would fall out. Then I would need to remove the pieces that melted and were too short and do the process over again. I did eventually get the hang of it and I am excited to continue making these pieces, but perhaps buying a new torch is in order.