pierced heart necklace

making chain is easy. tedious, but easy.

you start with wire, wrap it around something round until you have a coil. then you slip off the coil and cut straight down the side making many rings. you have to close each ring, making sure the fit is perfect, both sides touching. then you can solder (or if it’s fine silver, fuse) the ring closed.

you begin the simplest chain by soldering half the rings closed. then you loop an open ring through two closed rings, and solder it closed. i hope you are getting the idea by now. after repeating this, you finally have a chain.

for this necklace, i decided to hammer the rings to add interest to a pretty plain chain. nice.

initially, i had rings of different sizes making a pattern that connected this pendant to some other clusters of little arrows with drops and what not, along with some bars i had made out of really big rings (you twist them like a pastry). it was a MESS. so when my dad called to say he needed something special for valentine’s day, i of course thought of this necklace. and decided to start over.

so i made the simple chain, thinking the pendant is so fantastic (really, what are the odds on a chunk of chalcedony like that?) that a simple chain is the way to go. I solder and link and hammer and repeat until my chain is done. I make a fancy bar out of tubes and silver wire to support the pendant. I don’t like it when a necklace hangs like a v down the front of your chest, i like it to be rounder, like a neckline of a blouse, so i thought this bar would assist with that draping. it did.

hours of linking soldering and hammering later, i have a necklace. a dingy, whitish, ok looking necklace. it’s not shiny! how can one see the beauty of the hammered links glimmering in the candlelight?

the idea is, that when you heat silver, the impurities rise to the surface (the stuff that’s not silver), so when you put it in the pickle, they float away, leaving this coating of fine silver, which is, in the most polite way of putting it, a matte whitish surface. It works on some finishes, but it surely is not shiny.

So, how do you make a chain shiny?

Well, you could burnish it.

A burnisher is a smooth metal stick. It’s basically a rounded stick that’s pointed on the end. Made of steel i bet. with a wood handle. The idea is, you rub against the metal, it smooths and polishes it.

This totally works! I do the first 5 links and I am so pleased.

4 hours later, my elbows hurt to straighten and my fingers are numb. I’m not halfway through.

This takes days. This is not ok. This is not a solution. Every ring has two sides! Each side takes around 5 minutes of rubbing to get it perfectly shiny. And you have to be putting pressure on it too.

chalcedony pierced heart necklace, hand hewn sterling silver chain

but it’s pretty, right?

i finally got it shiny, polished the heck out of it so it hopefully won’t tarnish too soon, and sent it off. It’s really pretty, and I am very proud of it. Every bit of metal is sterling or fine silver. All the stones are chalcedony (agate). I was so happy that I could just scribe in the feathers on the arrow, and I tried (with a scribe, not a graver) to etch the word “love” onto the arrowhead.

All in all, I am pleased with this design. I hope to do more with arrows in the future. Kind of go off on an athena/diana tangent…

Oh right, the point of this post.

TUMBLER.

you make a chain shiny with a rock tumbler filled with STAINLESS steel shot. NOT carbon steel shot. I honestly can’t go into that right now, as about 4 hours ago, I did not secure the lid well enough on the tumbler and had to listen to 10lbs of carbon steel shot and soapy water pour onto my floor. It was like popcorn popping, in fast forward. Not cool. This tumbler and I have had our share of difficulties. It’s totally worth it. I could have polished this chain in 45 minutes. Sigh. You live and you learn, and I’m starting to think that’s the point of it all.