One of my more favorite makes for this term, just because they’re fairly simple to make and fun!
I didn’t have too much difficulty with these and they were a great project to quickly make since I was working on the box clasp and the marquise ring at the same time.
First I needed ball up two ends of both wires (making sure the balls were equal sizes. This is fun! Using flux to make sure the balls were smooth, I used my torch to melt the ends of the wire. They then needed to be hammered flat to the same thickness as the wire.
Then it was onto twisting the wire. I was going to use my hand drill but the two ends wouldn’t stay in the end, so it did manually using a mandrel for my foredom, a vice and pliers.
Then onto the soldering block to solder the wires to make sure the twists stayed in place when they were bent around a ring mandrel to make the hoops.
I needed to create a little loop for the catch, that needed to be soldered in place and then I needed to create another balled up piece of wire for the post and hammer that down too.
Then the final part was to create the rivet for the hinge. I drilled a hole through the flattened wire parts and the post and then put a piece of wire through and hammered each side to create the rivet, then it was polishing and done!
