I thought the wind would take all of our Fall leaves this week, but a few hardy souls remain. We’re not especially used to the blustering breezes nature just sent us, but the movement of the trees outside my studio window seemed to symbolize the rushing of people as they ready for the holidays. Of course the people are gathering as the trees are shedding. I hope the gathering brings good fortune to our local merchants.

I’ve been doing a bit of swirling myself this week – round and round and round. I saw a pendant made of three wire swirls in a catalogue my friend brought me. The swirls graduated from large to small in a straight line as they layered at the edge of one another. Of course, I couldn’t just make that one, mine would need to be different. Eventually, my pendant became a necklace composed of five circle swirls.

These swirls are soldered together and finished with a dark patina and a tumble. I liked this look and decided to enlarge it. Then I learned that often “less is more”. The larger necklace has the same number of swirls, but they have bigger diameters.

Before starting this piece, I didn’t realize how much more difficult it would be to keep the rounds held together. I kept adding solder to these circle hoping to connect the parts of each round. This, of course, led to solder showing on the front. Hmm . . . now what? The dark patina on the first piece did a nice job of covered the solder, but didn’t do as well on the larger piece. Also, the swirls continued to want to pull apart. Finally, I soldered a wire to the back of the necklace alleviating this problem.

 

You can see the solder still showing in this photo. Since it was also showing on the front of the main circle, I soldered a bezel and placed a charoite cab (from magpiegemstones.com) on the front.

Hurray! Following one last patina that required extra Q-tip applied liver of sulphur in spots to cover that stubborn solder, the piece went for a tumble and was complete.  The last picture shows the different in size between the two necklaces. Both of these are fairly heavy and used a good deal of wire. This was fine in copper, but I think I will curtail my plans for making this in sterling silver until prices for this wire go down. Do you think that will ever happen? It’s possible that the only way I’ll see this in silver made from my studio is to let that solder flow on the top!

The wind blows gently today, but bodes of cooler South Texas weather. I wonder what ideas it will bring me this week.