My recent sterling silver bangle-fest where I made quite a lot of silver bangles for hallmarking in various designs made me want to make something similar in copper. I really enjoyed making the stamped silver bangles on the right in this photo...
I hadn't done any stamping for a while and it reminded me how much I like doing it. When I say stamping I mean creating patterns from mostly circle and line stamps rather than the inspiring words/phrases/childrens names that are so popular. I can't stamp letters in a straight line and making that style of jewellery has never appealed to me at all. So I stick to making patterns.
I also made three copper bangles with a leaf vein texture using leaf skeletons. I used some 4mm {6g} round copper wire which I annealed then ran through the rolling mill a few times to flatten it.
After annealing the flattened wire again I ran it through the rolling mill with the leaf skeletons, holding them in place with my fingers as they go through. I left a gap between each leaf skeleton for a bit of contrast on the bangle and I reused the leaf skeletons as you only flatten a part of them as they go through the rollers.
The wire was now pretty wavy in both directions so I annealed it again and used my mallet and steel block to flatten and straighten it. You need to do this in order to get a straight cut on the ends.
I then cut the wire to the right length for medium size bangles and used my mitre block and file to make sure the edges were straight for the join.
Using a mitre block gives you lovely straight edges on your join making soldering very easy.
After soldering the bangles I rounded them on the mandrel, sanded the join and checked they were the right size.
I decided to add a few silver balls to one of the bangles. The gaps I'd left on the copper between the leaf vein texture were ideal places for the balls.
I prefer to apply flux and heat it to dry it first before I add anything else. Once the flux is dry I placed the solder and balls in position and soldered them on. That way I didn't have to fiddle with repositioning things that had moved due to the flux bubbling.
After pickling I sanded the inside of the bangles then cleaned up the outside with steel wool.
Then they went in the LOS {of course!}I haven't had chance to photograph them properly yet but I took a couple of quick photos in my shed after they came out of the tumbler.
I textured the stamped bangles in the rolling mill with sandpaper before stamping the copper. The stamped designs took a while to do but I enjoyed making up the patterns.
Did I tell you I had a thing for circles?......
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