From Student to Silversmith
My next story begins in the summer of 2007, after I past the age of fifty and finding it harder to find permanent employment, mainly due to many of the companies I had worked for locally had either gone out of bussiness or retired from making a living, undettered I began searching for as many new alternatives that I could, ones that might one day bring in dividends.
A couple of years earlier I had registered with the Anchor and Assay at Birmingham and aquired my makers stamp which is to be seen on many pieces of my recycled silverware, infact the stamp is now used for stamping my mark upon nearly everything I have made, including my simple homemade silversmiths bench above.
Many pieces of silver jewellery I have made are upcycled from vintage knives, spoon and foks, even old silver teapots that come my way that are beyond repair, above is seen the old hallmarks retained on the back side, this one was a George IV desert spoon and the two teardrop earrings are what was cut out of the bowl section after making a large Gothic Cross.
I do whenever possible make much of my own tools, seen above is a bracelet shaping press for rounding over bands and other shapes, these are quite expensive to buy retail around a couple of hundred, the one here cost me around ten pounds to craft together. the two items below were shaped using this home made tool.
The following items were made over several years for our own use, but there comes a time when one must part with a few in order to regain enough funds to create further things and newer tools, all the time gathering pace and commodities take quite a while.
The typical item for recycling come in the shape of old damaged silverware like this 1830's silver cup above, the handles make really nice snake rings, which are just long enough to curl right around most sized fingers and on past what is deemed as the head of the snake, seen here, infact I try to utilise every part of the scrapped item and only have dust afterwards, which is carefully collected for melting down again later.
Above can be seen a wooden bracelet madrel which I havd turned from an old pear tree that was blown over in a garden right now its being used for display purposes but is great at shaping the bands without marking them, and hard enough to be durable, the cost was only my time in crating it. Also in the right hand side of the picture is a stack of leather working pads which I made myself, sewn on the old patcher sewing machine I have, skills that pased over from the shoe making program.
As one mmight have noticed many of the items are textured, this is one of the things I do in order of work hardening the lighter materials like the hair ties shown but it also prevents the silver from scratching as easily and also catches the light as the item is moved about, some are part textured for looks and durability.
Another passtime I have been experimenting with is mixing metals like copper and silver like these copper medicinal bracelets, many of the standard copper bands are quite plain to look at, so I used incorporated designs from nature and mythology to make them more pleasing to look at as well as being medicinal, many are also hand textured to work harden them and prevent premature bending.
The earlings above are made out of an old silver fork, they retain their original curve from their place before, I chose these as they looked like a curved sword, then added two hand cut spirals to completment the plainess of the tapered tine, I quite like these ones.
The picture above shows where each of the following items came from in relation to this old cream jug, the base made the round pendant with the white fob in the middle and the section above that made this Yorkshire Rose and so on upwards to the next ring marked will become another curved and shaped bracelet, there was also another snake ring from the main handle, with a bit of luck I should get about a dozen different items of jewellery from this small jug.
Larger items like this dress necklace take a lot longer to put together, as the differing scrap leftovers come in I normally turn them into smaller items like dished and textured orbs and leave the edges wavy to catch the light, and sellect them to decrease in size as seen above, infact there is a myriad ways and things to make once you get the ideas flowing, so I hope this small collection has given those watching to get some scrap silver and to have a go themselves, and who knows we might see the new Paul de Lamerie one day.
Once again many thanks for watching, empower ones hand to eye coordination, have a go, think for yourself.