Basic Jewellery Course ( 2 days)

This is a free weekend basic skill jewellery course provided by Flux Studio just near our Uni. It is really good that the teacher is so nice and all the materials are free. It seems that every person lives in the Southwark Council range can apply for this course.

The first day we learnt how to work with bronze and brass, such as annealing, hammering, sawing, filing and using rolling mill. There are detailed notes at the end of this post about these tools and the way of using them.

At the end of the day, we started to make a strip for our semi-precious stone that we were going to solder it on our silver pendant the next day.

annealing

acid for cleaning the metal after annealing and special tweezers, steel tweezers is forbidden here

bronze and brass

creating onion skin texture

with rolling mill

creating texture with hammers

files, for sanding and smooth the metal

my brass piece

make a hole

polishing

measure the size of stone

make a strip

my and other class-mates' outcome

At the second day, we learnt how to set the strip on a piece of sliver. Before that we had to make the sliver piece into the shape we designed.

I pressed thread into the piece to create this water or grass like texture.

This this how it looked after I set the stone in and put on the jumping rings.

It is nice to try some new techniques and materials that they may give me some new ideas naturally. And I really enjoyed the making process, even I felt super tired after sawing for a long time. The result I have achieved also gave me huge satisfaction.

I found that trying new things can help my brain get some rest from my regular thinking. And actually they cannot be totally irrelative. For example, the texture created by round head hammer is the one I always want to make out in ceramics. Before I tried to pinch it out, and I failed. Now I found a new way to achieve it. Apart from that, the textures pressed by rolling mill are fascinating. I knew there is similar skill in ceramics, but I didn't use it for a long time that I even forgot. And this course just reminded me about it.

I know people always say life is your teacher, now I am clearly aware of it. I think that is a really good thing. I would like to tried those two methods I mentioned in practice and see how they are doing in ceramic.