Silver Linings

It's been a bit crazy these past couple of weeks.  I've had quite a few visitors and have been juggling school while feeling the need to entertain my guests as well.  Okay, truthfully entertaining my guests was more of an excuse to avoid my school work but now I am paying the price.  The good news is, I work well under pressure and have completely immersed myself in my studies (the two days before I started my pre-birthday and birthday and post-birthday binging).  The other good news is that I finally completed the hollow ring!  The last few phases included filling the holes with resin, filing and polishing.  

Using resin is literally like watching paint dry. 

The finished piece

It's pretty cool to see the colors with the sun shining through it.  Oh la la!

Even better news is we have moved on to silver!  This project is a set of earrings with a stone setting.  We started off with a small strip and have progressed quite quickly already. 

Silver prepped to make spheres

After I cut the pieces, I annealed them so that I could hammer them into half spheres.

After much hammering and filing, we end up with perfectly sized spheres. 

Once the spheres were soldered together, I filed them to make the surface smooth.  We chose two small stones and created a setting for them with the remaining silver left over from the spheres.

This week, we will create a piece to connect the balls and stone setting so more to come on this project. 

In the meantime and in between time, I am spending time sketching.  This has proven to be more challenging than making jewelry.  I used to think I was a decent artist but now I am having second thoughts about this. 

Square in Lucca, Tuscany

My sketch.  You be the judge

Maybe it's not so bad; I'm hopeful it will get better in time. 
That's all I have for now.  I'll post something else soon.  Ciao!