NKPdesigns

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Recyling Silver

 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.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Rings

 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 ....