My First Copper Hollow Form Pendant And The Mistakes I Made

I finished my first "proper" copper hollow form pendant last week. I say proper as I'd made 1.5 practice pendants beforehand to get the feel of doing them. The half was my first attempt and it went ok up to the point where I pierced out the hole in the centre after soldering the first piece of sheet to the frames. After piercing out the hole I then for some reason started to pierce out the rest of it which would have left me with basically the frames again (!) I did realize my mistake quite quickly.............
My second attempt went much better apart from quite a few gaps in the solder seam on both sides despite soldering one side FOUR times! Resoldering one area to fill the gap caused some other areas of solder to reflow and the solder to run off completely leaving even more gaps! I quickly decided I needed something to hold the frames and flat sheet together so the join was tighter and ordered some T pins...........

 First attempt....... looks ok-ish from this angle

Gaps in the solder seam

Despite the smallish gaps which were a bit annoying the pendant did look ok and I finished it by making a coiled wire bail and soldering it to the back. I then thought the coil bail stuck out too much and had a bit of a brain storm and decided to hammer it so the three coils were more oval shaped than round and you can probably guess where this is going........

 
Hammering the bail did flatten the coils nicely. It also very nicely created a dent in the back of my HOLLOW pendant. Sigh.... I won't do that again........ever :D
 

I did manage to finish the third pendant without too much stress or dentage. The T pins did help a lot with keeping the join tight although I still had to solder a second time to fill a gap on one side. I used some copper I textured at college with a skeleton leaf for the front and soldered two flattened fine silver balls onto the front.

 Close up with no solder gaps!

I finished the pendant with a copper bail which is the first time I've ever made this type of bail. It was a simple "p" shape soldered at the top and back. I was quite pleased with how it turned out once I decided how to hang it. I was originally going to place the bail so the pendant hung the other way but I needed some space for the silver dots towards the bottom so went for the wider option.

Coming soon....my first version in lovely silver :D