Daily Archives: March 23, 2011

A good day for earrings, but photos…

…not so much. I had a great morning in the studio, finishing some earrings with rivets, and some with copper pieces I had patinated last week. I spent the afternoon taking 118 photographs of 5 pairs of earrings I was planning to list on Etsy. I thought I was getting some good shots until I began to crop and edit them. Some were okay, but there weren’t 5 decent images of any one pair. Etsy will have to wait until next week, because I have something really exciting to do this weekend.

Silver was $36.97 today. Yikes. The cost of silver clay has become prohibitive. I’ve started thinking about sheet metal and simple fabrication. After an experiment with patina on copper discs, I decided to rivet them to some earring shapes I had cut from sterling silver sheet. I hammered the silver and gave it a hand finish, rather than a high polish. Not sure if I like the concave discs on this particular pair. The shape is from a template I made for toggle clasps, but it works out pretty well for an earring too.

I love the colors in the copper so much, that I decided to learn more about it. I’m waiting for the arrival of some patina solutions from Shannon LeVart at Miss Ficklemedia. The pdf file for the Color Drenched Metal tutorial is well written and looks like it will be easy to follow when my supplies get here next week.

Oh yeah…rivets!!

More copper discs with patina, mounted on PMC discs, mounted on beautiful glass head pins made by Sue Kennedy at SueBeads.

Hey Sue, check us out!

I had some copper discs lying around…. and I’m waiting to learn more about patinas….but I just want to keep riveting! Check out Sue Kennedy’s off-white glass head pins below. The white disc inside the rivet is some kind of bone. (I think.)  Sterling silver and gold filled head pins are used as rivets.

The photos below are the best of my worst ones. (Faint praise.) I didn’t feel like taking the time to deal with everything they were reflecting. That’s the problem with shiny silver and photography. I was happy with the decorative rivets, though.

Finger reflection and finger print….eeeesh. Not recommended.

Whoa baby!

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