Ha! Opps... I got a bit happy with the torch this morning and melted the floor part of my ring bezel. I added this in with the rest of my scrap silver.
I realized I had some chunks of
silver my father gave to me a while back. He said I should sell it for scrap money to buy more silver. This is one of his scraps from years ago when he was working in silver. I got to thinking about that rolling mill I bought and haven't much used. I picked and annealed the silver scrap nugget, banged on it with a hammer to flatten it a bit, annealed it some more and put it through the rolling mill.
Here is my rolling mill.
I repeated this process several times.Until it looked like this: I again annealed and pickled and rolled, repeat repeat repeat ...
Here it sits on the charcoal.
So this is what I ended up with. It is about 26 gauge, full of cracks and such ... a lot of work for basically nothing.
It was worth a try though to see if I could recycle it myself. I guess I'll put it back in the scrap bucket.
I am prefacing this with the fact that I am not quitting pottery or quitting making beads -- but I have been experimenting with metalwork.
For the past year I've been reading and learning about making rings with bezels and I have finally come to the point where I have some equipment and supplies to work with.
This
weekend I made two rings, one copper and one silver, both with agate
settings. Each has its own set of flaws, most notably that the bezel on
each of them have a very tiny stress fracture. And I haven't worked on
highly polishing them yet.
The copper ring ended up being almost a size 8, and the silver one about a 6 and a half. I'm a size 7 and I am baffled as to why they both fit my finger so well. So much to still learn ....
