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

[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 :)