Hello from Morocco. Watching you work this Stone to make a jewel. This encourages me to go next month in search of Amethysts on the side of the high Atlas mountains. Be healthy, happy and as always creative. Benomar
I’m a collector of rocks, so this will be a great help in setting stones. Thank you for the lesson. I enjoy your videos even though I haven’t been able to make jewelry for the past four years. You make everything look so easy and are very calm when things don’t quite go your way and just come up with a new solution. Please keep up with the great work.
Great vid on making a frame with prongs! A friend gave me some stones from a beach from Tahoe she would like a pendant of. This has given me some ideas. 😊
I find it a bit too chunky for my taste, but looking at it has definitely given me some ideas for lapidary work. I now know what to ask for this Mother's Day - a lapidary saw and a grinding and polishing tool. I already have a Dremel and a tumbler, so I'm already halfway there.
Hey Chad,well I gave this 1 a go for my first attempt at it. It was going well until I got to soldering the bail closed. I melted it. I was a bit disheartened to say the least, but I ended up cutting the pointy end off the bail and making it into a sort of tube and soldering it to the main part. It's not great but I finished my first piece
I liked that specimine pendant. I facet, sometimes for something like that I like to facet the edges to the natural geometries and cut the wires down half the thickness touching the stone and set it like a gemstone, but now I'm thinking I want to try a few like you did. Nice work!
Thanks Bsanchez! I’m glad you found this useful. Check out my playlist tab where things are organized into different categories. It may help you to choose projects appropriate for someone just getting started. Good luck on your metalsmithing journey:)
Love your videos and just subscribed. On this particular one, is the sq wire bezel that you made, does the stone just sit on it and then the prongs hold it in? I love raw rocks, thanks.
Thank you! I have subscribed! I have noticed that you don’t seem to tickle your pieces between each step. Is that because you’re using pick soldering and you don’t need to?
Very good, so a couple ?'s...I have some 6 odd shaped turquoise stones that I need to set all of which has much matrix host. I don't have lapidary equipment but can I use wet/dry sandpaper starting at 220 to 600 to smooth a flat back and then use Renaissance wax to shine them up a bit as they're quite dull? I'm making memorial pendants for friends of a man who passed and he had given them out to a special few. Thank you for any tips on this! Kim J
Thanks for the comment Kim! I have never personally done any stone work without machinery:). What you are suggesting sounds like it would work, but it would be better if someone with some experience doing similar things could comment on this. Maybe one of my subscribers who has a lot of lapidary experience could chime in on this issue. Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you on this one.
Hello Sarah! Pickle is to clean up the silver. It removes both excess flux and oxides from the surface of the silver that form during repeated heating. The type I use is dilute sulfuric acid, although many people use other types. Hope this helps. Thanks for the good comment!
@@abs2868 Hello A BS. Different pickles probably have different ratios. I mix up my pickle weaker than the box suggests, and it works fine. I bet if you do a Google search on different jewelry pickles you’ll be able to find better info on this than I can provide. Thanks for the comment.
