Filigree Snowflake!

[afmetalsmith]

Sterling Silver Filigree Snowflake #1 My first completed original filigree design! It had something like 28 soldering operations, though I was able to do 2 at a time most of the time.

Comments

[m0usegrrl.livejournal.com]

That is simply lovely! I love filigree. ^_____^

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I am still entranced by it. I have some experiments I hope to get to next week- like I'm going to have loads of time in teh Xmas build-up, and with D visiting! :P

[gandryyne.livejournal.com]

*Whistles* Verty Pretty!!!

Btw: Will be wearing my confetti ring lots over the holidays. :) I had to scale back my wearing of it because I'm afraid to ding it up.

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

It is my personal opinion that the confetti rings will actually look nicer in some ways once the super high polish is a bit worn. The metal's shininess distracts the eye from the stones and their sparkle and color, I think, and they'll get more vivid when there's a patina of faint tiny scratches on the metal. I actually used pumice to get a very light scratch finish on yours before doing the hard shine, and the stones just glowed. So fear not! It'll improve.

And if you don't like it without the hard shine, send it back after that happens and I'll polish it up again. :)

[themaskmaker.livejournal.com]

Ooooooohhhhhh.....

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)

[medvssa.livejournal.com]

wow I love it!!

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)

It's a rather insane number of soldering operations, since pretty much every join between 2 pieces needs to be soldered twice, once on each side. I'm using incredibly wee amounts of solder. The ops go really fast, and when I have several pieces I can usually do 2-4 operations on each one before pickling, so it goes faster the more I'm doing.

I'm thinking that if the argentium will fuse, it would be easier to do more joining per heat since there's no concern about the solder flowing where it's supposed to. I might also be able to tack weld the pieces together, and save some time and effort that way... :)

Fun stuff!

[medvssa.livejournal.com]

Filigree is certainly very nice! so will you try with argentium? and sorry but, what is tack welding? I am a bit clueless, hahah.

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Yep! I've got the argentium wire, and rolled it out after twisting it yesterday. So my next 2 filigree starts will be an argentium piece, and one that uses 2-3 different weights of filigree wire (sterling).

Tack welding uses electricity to make a weak join between 2 pieces of metal. Normal sterling and copper alloys conduct electricity too well for it to be very effective, but argentium is much less conductive (as are gold and platinum), so I'm hoping it'll work with argentium and gold. One of the pains of the filigre is that the tiny feather-weight pieces can be blown around by the gas of even a very small torch tip! so tack welding would keep them in place until they're soldered. In theory. I hope. :)

[medvssa.livejournal.com]

Oh, cool! keep us informed :)

[puddock.livejournal.com]

That is stunning, even Tony commented that it was pretty as he was looking over my shoulder.

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Wow! Thank you! :)

[seejenknit.livejournal.com]

unique and beautiful!

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)

[laurasaurora.livejournal.com]

pretty! i like how it's vaguely heart like at the ends...

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! The heart shape is one of the basic filigree shapes that the "Silver Threads" author uses a lot as a basic component- her stuff is very based on several specific "building block" shapes.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Very nice!

[afmetalsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)