Bling in the New Year!!

Welcome 2020! Hello to all my lovely people. Hope you are all happy and well. It's the start of another exciting year for Tirma Deisgns. Time to think of more jewellery designs, take stock of what I have already and improve the presentation of photos.

How that is something I really need to concentrate on, my jewellery photo's. I think it's time to invest in some hand models and models to wear some of my creations, so people can really get the full picture of how they sit on a person.

So there will be a revamp of the photo's for some of my jewellery.

Now all I have to do is to find some nice models to take part in my venture.

That aside, I am branching out my ideas for jewellery creation and have learnt some interesting technique to create different textures or designs.

At the moment I have just finished fold forming. This involves folding a piece of metal over (can be copper, brass, silver etc), and then hammering it together as much as you can with a flat headed hammer. Once you have done that you anneal the metal and pickle it.

Now comes the fun part!

Cut out the shape you want, I went for this:

Then once you have done that you get a peen hammer, and start hammered the edge of the folded metal.

You need to make sure that you don't hammer the seem. That is the thing that keep the metal together. You carry on hammering the metal until you see it starting to stretch and curve slightly. This is when you know that the hammering is working.

As you can see on the picture I have drawn that the metal starts to curve and stretch. Once you have the desired shape that you want you have to anneal it again.

Now this is where it gets a little tricky ( I have a great tip for people who are doing this with silver coming up). If you have done this with brass or copper, you won't have a problem. Copper and brass have a different melting point, so there is not danger of melting the 2 together.

With silver, the best thing to do is turn the light off, when you see the silver glowing, stop asap!

And put it into the pickle. If you keep soldering it you will reticulate the metal and it will join together. Making it impossible to do the next step.

When you are happy with it and how far you have opened it, now is the time to start tidying up the edges. Smoothing them down and shaping the pieces.

Polish with soft sandpaper to remove any discolourisation through the anealing and pickling process.

Then polish with rouge to bring out the beautiful design. You can also run a burnisher along the edges to create that extra shine on the metal.

Once finished you will end up with unique pieces of jewellery that will catch anyone's eye should they gaze upon it.

I will uploading some pictures of my finished pieces, but have shown some examples of other persons' work so you can get an idea of the designs you can make.

Go on give it a go!!

This one on the left is particularly beautiful and just working on metal on a larger scale. The principal remains the same. You still have to hammer the metal avoiding the seam but you work on 4 pieces at the same time.