Turquoise and Lace

A few process pics from my newest ring. Of course, I forgot to take pics during most of the crucial events but you get the idea.

I'm having a serious brain lapse on getting my Riverwoman stamp on these pieces. I'll have to sign them by hand. I sweat soldered my name tag on this one and managed to melt the crap out of it and had to unsweat solder it. Jeez, if I could just remember to stamp the ring shank...

The beginning, the bezel is already cut and soldered, the architectural elements are stamped, cut and sanded, and still trying a lot of different sized silver balls.

On the soldering bench, the bezel is soldered to the backplate first and then the extra elements are soldered on. I managed to get all those little pieces stuck on at the same time without melting anything, yay!

Polished up and ready to saw off the extra part of the backplate

Sawed the backplate around the piece. Now it's ready for the ring shank. This part I forgot to photograph. I made a wide band, sawed it it three parts, spread them out and refined and then soldered on the side elements before soldering the two main parts together.

 Here it is, cleaned up before adding the Liver of Sulfur patina.

If this was my ring I'd leave it with the heavy patina on. It wears off pretty quickly but I love the blues and golds you can get with carefully applied LOS.

 Polishing off most of the LOS leaves a ring with depth and character. This is a pretty piece of natural Royston Nevada turquoise. It is heavily backed, but that helps cushion the stone and lets me use the high thick bezel I prefer.

Always...

Sgraffito

The Italian word of the day.

Whew, just finished up the grueling two week stretch of the Open Studios Tour. It was a circus (in the best way possible) at my house these weekends. The four of us had the best time, talked ourselves silly, sold a bunch of  beautiful things and laughed a lot at the same time.

I do demos most of the day and about day three I was tired of hearing myself talk about the same processes. So I tried out a new enamel technique called sgraffito, which is basically scratching a design into the enamel and firing it. Of course, there is more to it than that but you get the idea.

Here are a few. I'm desperately tired and trying to get things put away here and there.

They'll get better. The first pair sold right away. More later...

Always