Last weekend was Mother’s Day. Let’s look take a look at the step by step process of creating a sentimental yet ultimately impossible gift.
So we start with an outline of our daughter’s head. Nice and simple, and since I have a bunch of tools for carving printmaking plates out of wood, stone and metal I should have no issue etching these out by hand.
Wrong. I don’t even have pictures of the first 8+ hours spent trying to make any sort of visible mark in these rocks. That was a dumb plan.
Next we’ll buy a Dremel from Amazon with no practice or guidance we’ll just go to town on these red rocks and totally destroy them. Good. Too bad I like the shape of them but now they are neat shaped rocks with light red smudges on them.
The blue rock was much harder and as such held the image much better. It was also the 3rd attempt so maybe the first two were practice. Next step is to turn this from a paperweight into jewelry. Let’s get out the drill, and use water to cool the bit and work our way through the stone to make a nice hole to work with.
Nope. That’s one hour of drilling depth right there. Not going to happen. Guess we’ll just have to work the stone into the jewelry.
A few hours of reading online and this is our first attempt at wrapping the stone with wire. Looks ok but is far too loose to be used.
We’ll take a quick time out to make the bracelet itself since that is way way easier. Except it’s not. the picture is of the first bracelet which could be pulled up to your bicep. The second one worked out much better.
Here is the final product of wrapping attempt two. Functional and stable and heinously ugly. It looks like a cheap wrapper for some bottom shelf wine cork.
So this time we’ll take it slow and hide the twist wrapping behind the stone… but it still looks terrible with that wrapping cage across the right side.
And we’ll scrap that entire style and return to our first setting, with a twist. The twist is with pliers in the back to make it the wire tighter.
And here is the final product mounted to the bracelet. It looks pretty passable, it does however weigh far too much to be used as a bracelet. Tune in next week to see how it looks when I change it into a pendant!
-Eric
jellyneggs.com 