Learning To Bezel Set - New Earrings

I thought I'd put my newly-learned bezel setting skills to the test and start making earrings with stones. It's a technique I've been itching to learn for a long time but I'll be honest the prospect of making a "proper" start on bezel set jewellery did daunt me a bit. There's so much that can go wrong - melting your bezel, the cab not fitting, getting to the point where everything is finished and you "just" have to set the stone and then you go and scratch it beyond repair with your bezel pusher......I've done that once (so far!)

I have a bezel roller and a bezel pusher and a burnisher and all three of them have the potential to ruin all your hard work in a second by scratching the stone! I've now started using a peg I took apart and filed and sanded to round the top edge to set my stones.

They're not the most ergonomic design being a bit short to hold but they work fine and don't scratch metal or stones if I slip. I saw this tip for using wooden dowel instead of a metal bezel pusher on the Etsy Metal blog. I still use a burnisher to finish off and smooth the top but I have found I'm very good at slipping and putting tiny nicks on the top edge of the bezel! Practice makes perfect I know!!

 

This is one of the first pair I made in silver with 6mm carnelian cabs

 

I found soldering the bezels could sometimes be a bit troublesome! Placing a tiny piece of solder on top of the join then watching it ping off as the flux bubbles meant soldering 6 bezels took me an hour! Admittedly, one of them wouldn't solder properly because the join wasn't very good so I had to make it again (er.......twice!). I also have problems with my max flame butane torch. I don't seem to be able to fill it properly and it only works for about a minute before the flame becomes so small it resembles a cigarette lighter! Having to fill it literally in the middle of soldering something does not help matters. I've since sorted this and now use my propane/butane mix torch with a finer nozzle.

One of the silly things I noticed since starting to make bezel set earrings is that I would totally forget the correct order of work! I think I'm so excited about getting the bezel the correct size and soldering it that I would then have to think about what to do next. Instead of getting everything ready that needed to be soldered I would do a bit then have to make the hanging loops or the earwires or decide what to do with the base I was going to solder the bezel to. In the meantime it would be lunchtime and I'd have to clear away my soldering equipment from the kitchen!

I now make sure I have everything ready to go before starting to solder. Hammering tiny pieces of solder so they are wafer thin and putting the bezel join on top of the flattened solder (no pinging off!) also makes soldering the bezels a lot easier and quicker.

I love the colour of this dyed calcite. I added three flattened balls of fine silver then trimmed the base sheet around the bezel and balls. Still experimenting!

So far I've had to scrap three pairs of earrings. I tend to make three or four pairs at a time - maybe that's not a good idea as it makes the whole process feel like it's taking days! The first pair was when I messed up the hanging loop. It slid about as the solder flowed and my fear of holding small things in place with tweezers (now conquered) stopped me from sorting it out properly and I ended up with solder that had crawled over to the front of the copper earring. It was a mess beyond repair so it ended up in the bin. 

The second pair I ruined by stamping the base too close to the bezel and knocking it out of shape (wrong order of work!). Some over-vigorous prodding of the bezel to move it back into shape meant it was stretched too much and too big for the cab. Another one for the bin!

The third pair went fine up to almost finishing setting the amethyst cab and then I slipped with the metal bezel rocker and scratched the stone. Sweary shouting occurred! I tried polishing the scratch out gently but it ended up looking worse. This one hangs on the side of my scrap pot to remind me to use my wooden pegs and take things slowly!

Turquoise and silver with silver rosette and ball decoration.

 Still experimenting and realizing silver and copper that is textured, stamped or etched looks a whole lot better when it's oxidized than plain untextured metal! You don't get the obvious clean up marks and scratches you can see on plain metal.

I'll be honest there have been several times when I've wondered if bezel setting was worth it. The amount of time it takes me to make something from start to finish feels like days.  BUT I know it will get easier as I start to feel less scared of the whole process and just relax and enjoy it. Any words of encouragement and advice gratefully accepted :D

My Latest Silver Jewellery Class Project - Bezel Setting

Oh my goodness I was so excited when we finally got round to bezel setting at my Tuesday night silver jewellery course! It was really the reason I enrolled on the course and a technique I've been wanting to learn ever since I started making more metalwork style jewellery. I even bought some copper bezel wire from an Etsy seller several months ago with the idea of teaching myself. I thought about it then chickened out, reasoning that it looked quite technical and precise and I'd probably fair better being shown by a teacher!

First we had to choose a stone. Alison the jewellery teacher was going to order them from Kernowcraft so after deliberating for a long time at home (I'm good at that) I choose a pretty 10mm round prehnite cab. When she came to order it at the class they were out of stock (course they were!) so I chose kyanite instead as the blue colour looked lovely.

I made the ring band with D shaped silver wire then came the fiddliness that is measuring and cutting the bezel wire. I found it really very fiddly and was worried that I'd do it wrong/get the size wrong, etc, etc. Then there's the fiddling about making sure the ends are square and meet perfectly. I got there in the end and managed to solder the bezel without melting it. Yay! Alison's way of doing it was to solder the bezel closed and to the backing piece of silver in one go. I decided not to do it this way as I wasn't confident enough that the bezel was the exact right size and if it wasn't then I'd have to start again. None of the jewellery books/ tutorials I've seen for bezel setting do it that way either, it's always solder the bezel closed, check the fit then solder to the back piece.

My bezel was a little small so I stretched it gently, checked the fit again and soldered it to the back piece of silver sheet. After trimming the sheet and filing and sanding I was ready to solder the bezel to the ring. I had a bit of a problem as the ring kept falling over as I moved the flame near it to solder it to the bezel. Really infuriating and we didn't have a third hand to use so Alison had to help by holding the ring in position! My hand isn't steady enough and I find having to concentrate on holding something perfectly still and be aware of what the other hand is doing with the torch tends to make me a bit twitchy and likely to panic slightly and probably melt something! But we got there in the end. After some more filing, sanding and polishing I was finally ready to set the stone. That went quite smoothly until I slipped with the bezel pusher and scratched the stone. It's so easy to do but thankfully the kyanite has a fairly rough texture due to it's inclusions so the scratch wasn't that obvious. Me being a bit short-sighted helps here too!

I haven't taken the ring off since I finished it so the silver is a bit scratched now but I do love it. You can see the scratch in the above photo at roughly 5 o'clock on the stone. 

I found the whole process really time-consuming and fiddly but the end result is definitely worth it and I WILL get better at it, really I will.

•♥•

•♥• My precious •♥•

Goodbye Facebook

I decided to deactivate my Facebook account today. I'm hearing a few sharp intakes of breath as some people read this I'm sure. I didn't decide to do it due to any particular problems I've had on Facebook, more cancelled due to lack of interest (on my part).

I opened the account when I opened my Folksy shop as that was what people in the know said you should do when you start a business. And then of course I felt very inadequate because I didn't have hundreds of likers so I joined in the link love thing that was going on at the time and gained quite a few. Great, all these people interested in my jewellery..........except the majority weren't the slightest bit interested in what I make and just did the link love thing in order to gain more likers themselves. Not to be unfair, there were quite a few people who did genuinely like my jewellery and who would comment and like stuff I posted and some have become internet friends and customers which is great.

But what about promoting my business without a Facebook page? Some people have fantastic success using Facebook as a selling tool. Some people. To be honest I've never spent much time on promoting. The majority of followers I had were fellow makers with stuff to sell themselves, not really the target market I should've been aiming for. I do blog which I love and find much more personal and easier to do than Facebook. My shop views from my blog far outweigh my views from Facebook too. I am genuinely baffled when I hear some people claim they spend nearly all day on Facebook. I just cannot imagine what they do on there all day??! What do they do?? Does all that promoting mean they're inundated with sales? Obviously not or else they wouldn't be on Facebook all day. Whenever I used to signed into my Facebook page all I saw was a blur of posts, some I would read and comment/like because they were the one's I really was interested in but most I would just ignore. Ten minutes (maybe) would pass and that would be it, there'd be something else I needed to do so I'd be off. So I suppose I should have hidden lots of posts and just had the one's from people I was interested in show up on my newsfeed. Yes I could've done that but I just didn't care enough to bother (oh dear!) I also wasn't interested in my stats email either and would delete it immediately!

I'm not completely blameless, I didn't really "work" Facebook like I should have but that would've required quite a lot of commitment and time that I prefer to spend on developing my jewellery making skills to make stuff so people can buy it. As someone in the handmade industry I'm aware of the huge number of people on Facebook with lovely things to sell but if I was someone without any links to the handmade world looking to buy a nice bit of handmade jewellery I would Google for it. I wouldn't ever, ever think of going onto Facebook to look for some nice earrings, why would I ? Facebook to most people is a social media site not a shopping site.

I'm not knocking Facebook, it serves a purpose and if I had family/friends in other parts of the world I would use it to keep in touch and post photos. Facebook makes that really easy to do and I may even return one day. Thank you to all of the people who took the time to read and comment or like my posts and to those who posted funny/thought-provoking photos and posts I enjoyed seeing. As for the rest of it, the fake popularity, wasting time promoting your business to people who mostly aren't really interested and most important of all, feeling guilty because I'm not devoting chunks of my time doing it all, I think I'd rather do without it :D

Transform Your Ikea Storage Boxes!

It's funny how stumbling across something as you wander around the internet sets you off on a new project. I was looking for storage for my bedroom and found a website called Ikea Hackers where people have altered items bought from Ikea. There was a post on how someone had pimped their Ikea Moppe mini drawers to resemble those library card storage drawers that are so expensive to buy now. I found the blog post by Kristine of The Painted Hive which explains how she did it and I was inspired to have a go myself!

First I had to buy the drawers. There isn't an Ikea near Eastbourne, well there are stores at Lakeside and Croydon but they're a bit far unless you want to make a day of it. Blessed will be the day they open an Ikea in Brighton! I'm afraid I am an Ikea virgin and have yet to set foot in a store with all their things of loveliness I can only drool over from afar. So I bought the drawers on Amazon instead.......

I sanded the unit to smooth the untreated pine and to round the corners slightly before wiping with a damp cloth to remove the dust. I did this outside on a freezing day and could only just feel my hands by the time I'd finished! After I'd warmed up I decorated the front of the drawers with a stamped design.

I used some of the stamps I use for etching copper with Stayz On ink and stamped the "back" of the drawers as I was going to add knobs to them and didn't want the finger holes visible. I then stained the pine with a dark oak coloured wood dye. I gave it two coats, leaving it to dry for an hour between coats.

 I then applied two coats of Danish Oil which soaks into the wood and gives it a soft shine. I was really pleased with the colour and the way it brings out the grain.

Then it was time for knobs! I had planned on antique brass knobs but doing a search I discovered the wonderful world of ceramic knobs! Ooh, they are lovely! Especially the hand painted Indian style which made it very hard to choose. I was going to stick to smallish one's as the drawers are small but went for 4cm knobs in the end (there's more choice in the bigger sizes). I choose some orange and cream painted knobs from eBay.......eventually.

After drilling holes for the knobs and using my round jewellery needle file to make them bigger (didn't have a big enough drill bit!) the knobs were fitted. Ta da! An uninspired plain pine box transformed!

I really enjoyed the whole project as it was nice to do something different and not jewellery related. Now I want to do some more!