My third fine silver project, a mermaid's tale. Proud of myself for taking on something complicated and not losing my shit (mostly) when things didn't go well. Made with fine silver metal clay, both stones are labradorite.
I wanted to create a fantastical piece, something bold, otherworldly. A mermaid's tail, scales a flash of blue, droplets of water cascading down her fluke. Yep that's what the flappy part of the tail is called - a fluke! I shaped both the tail and the fluke separately in terra cota first, baked it, then made a silicon mold of each piece. I figured it would be easiest to work on them as separate pieces, and join them later. The biggest challenge was shrinkage, metal clay shrinks when fired and I had to factor that in when creating space for the stone and bezel. Spoiler: I didn't leave nearly enough room!
I joined the tail and fluke together with liquid clay, and once it was all dry, I started sanding the edges and correcting little issues here and there. It was really delicate work. Once I was happy with it, I use liquid clay that comes in a syringe to pipe fine lines on top of each ridge of the tail, and applied a few of the "water droplets", which are little balls of the clay, rolled by hand in different sizes. And I soldered my first thing!!! I had to make a bezel for around the stone, so I used pre-bought fine silver bezel with a lovely scalloped design, cut it to fit, soldered it with jeweler's hard solder and a mini blow torch, and filed it smooth after. Watching the solder flow into the joint perfectly was exciting!
I tried to fire the mermaid's tail at the same time as my Memphres, but it was just too large. In any case, here you can see the piece in its greenware (raw) state, on the firing block and ready to go.
There she is! Ready to clean and polish, I used a wired brush. But yikes, the shrinkage was too much, the stone didn't fit! I learned another new skill, out came to dremel and I worked on grinding away some of the silver in the tail so that the stone would slide into space properly. I went to solder the bezel and remaining droplets on and it would not happen! I did a little more research, tried again, no luck. 5-6 times, no luck. I couldn't get the solder to flow. I suspect the thickness of the tail and the fact that the bezel is set several millimeters into it made it hard to heat it up quite right. But I did have a bonding paste so I tried that, and bingo, it worked. I used way too much, and it bubbled all around, but I was able to clean most of it off later just fine. More lessons learned...
And there she is! But not without more toil, the stones wouldn't fit, the soldering process must have shifted the bezels a bit. Out came the dremel, and I learned how to grind down the stones a bit to have them fit properly. Perfect.
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