I’ve been riveting all weekend and I’m still not very good at it. Intrigued by the look of my new bracelet design, I felt that surely if I made several of them I would get faster at riveting. Alas, this has not yet been the case. I guess this would be a good time to also work on patience. Each piece of ornamentation on these bracelets is attached with wire rivets and I do like the way they look.

The metal for the top and the bottom bracelets was “touched by fire” to give it color variation while the middle bracelet’s rectangular shapes were not treated with the torch.

Some of the difficulty in riveting occurs when the circular pieces are domed. I’m still not sure whether to dome and then rivet or vice versa. Either way is a little tricky.

I’m also trying some pendants using the same technique. Although it’s difficult to see in the photo below, the pieces of the necklace pendant say faith, hope and love. I was trying to capture the look of a mobile when I selected the double hanger for this pendant.

I was working on the bird pendant at our wire workers meet up and exclaimed out loud “I can’t get this bird to rivet!” The clever lady next to me said, “it’s not supposed to. It isn’t a frog.” Eventually, the bird DID rivet.

I plan to keep practicing. Keep your fingers crossed that my riveting skills improve. I think it would be pretty tacky to have to resort to glue!