Pearly aspirations

Copper sheet and copper wire pendant
© 2011 Nayna Shriyan

Recently an uncle and aunt of mine went to Singapore on a vacation and came back with two strings of what is known here as 'rice' pearls. These pearls are essentially longish like grains of rice but also slightly rounded off in the middle, and one string of very beautiful black round pearls (cultured I think) and asked me to create a piece for her and one for me :D !!
Well for my aunt I created this piece, in keeping with my personal style of jewelery making and also the fact that the piece needed to be a little sober for my aunt's style. There will be a string of pearls above the pendant on either side and four smaller strings that will dangle from below the piece. What do you think, too much metal and not enough pearls or does it help in bringing out the beauty of the pearls. Hope to finish the piece by tomorrow. :)

Enameled necklace with copper accents

Enameled necklace with copper accents, copper and vitreous enamel
© 2011 Nayna Shriyan

 

 

I had finished enameling this piece a while back but just could not figure out how to put the rest of the necklace together! Tried using cords, chains, chain maille nothing seemed to work and yet as I kept looking at the piece till I realized continuing the design in metal was the only way. What do you think, would cord or some chain maille have worked better?

Lentil bead earrings

Lentil bead earrings , copper
©2011 Nayna Shriyan

I made two interesting discoveries lately, 1) I could actually solder better than I thought and my amazing rolling mill let me create textures with practically anything!! What better way to demonstrate both these facts than these sweet earrings! The lentils in these earrings the main feature actually took a bit of time to create, cutting out the discs, texturing them ( with a texturing hammer), doming them and cutting out the central rounds, (Whew!) But the fun part was soldering them by placing them vertically tied up with some iron binding wire. While that was a snap, it made me realize that once I had used these wires, mostly they could not be reused, they seemed to melt at points where I lingered with my torch. So I crumbled up a few wires and rolled them along with some copper pieces and voila! I had a really nice line texture. Made up ear wires and thin chains and a really cute pair of earrings !! What do you think should I use the lentil in more of my work, I am quite fascinated by them. :)

Lookout below-- jewellery being constructed!!

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       Recently I started feeling very nostalgic about my metalwork and decided that even though I wanted to concentrate on making jewelry for now, there was no way I could forget my second love ( oils will always be my first :).

          So here is one of my first pieces done about half way. As you can see in this picture that some of the design has been soldered onto the upper dome, but the two halves themselves are not yet joined.

 Though this is pretty much what it will look once done.

And here it is with the soldering done ( loads more finishing left to do though ! ) Thinking of adding a cabochon to the central portion ,what do you think?  Maybe a nice Lapis Lazuli, have a few in different shapes. 

 I wold like to apologize for the terrible quality of the pictures, been taken with my cell phone and not my SLR as usual :(