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Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Making Jewelry Without Soldering


Since I temporarily gave up soldering and enameling, I've been a little stuck on how to make interesting jewelry using only cold working methods. After a brief and unsuccessful foray into wirewrapping, I had the idea to try out some tab settings using etched copper pieces in the place of stones. Here's my first successful piece made in this style. It took a little refining to get this design to look "finished" the shaping of the prongs and the curvature of the backplate really helped to give it a little dimension. The setting is cut from a single piece of silver sheet, so there is no soldering involved, and I used my new electrolytic copper etching setup to etch the copper.
This one's available in my shop right now, and I'm planning on making more pieces in this series soon!

PS: More copper beads coming this week thanks to the magic of electrolytic etching!

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