Fabricating a Miniature Sterling Silver Flower

hey guys it's Melanie Klein in western Colorado I am a gardener and a jeweler and I can't work the soil because it's still too cold so I've challenged myself to make these little teeny size of a penny botanical vignettes a flower a day they're meant to challenge my skills and to amuse me and I've been posting them on my Facebook page but a lot of you that have seen them are asking how the heck did she make those teeny tiny flowers so I promised that I would do a video and I've never have before but right here with me is Craig who has and he's home because of the lockdown so he's agreed to help me hey hon okay so I'm hoping to show you how to make this little Columbine now I'm having to make it a little bit bigger than you see in this vignette because the camera would never be able to catch anything as tiny as the one that's yours pictured right now so the one above that you see is the one that we're going to make today [Music] so for the columbine we're going to be using standard centrifuge and in this case we're using 24 gauge we're going to be using round wire 20 gauge and half round wire 14 gauge and we're starting by creating our pattern on the silver sheet and the way I like to do it is to glue and this is just printer paper the glue paper to my silver after sanding it really well to make sure that the paper will stick it's important to sand it to have it have the tooth or whatever that term might be to really stick otherwise your saw when you're sawing through there with your jeweler style you'll see it wants to lift it off and I know that there's other jewelers that use like a shipping label or I don't know a tracing paper I don't know what all they do but for me this is what works the best and I find that the shipping label or tape just gums up my saw when I'm trying to cut so make sure that when we put it on there you smooth it all out so that there's no lumps underneath there because if there's lumps in your drawing you may make a mistake on your sign get rid of all the excess make sure you need to really be able to see the edge so I do it I've finished my edges with a file actually and that really helps because sometimes you're working with some silver that you've already cut into and it's got curves and angles and it's not a straight edge like that but if I use the half round side of my file I could go right down to the edge and I need to do that because I need to conserve the metal sterling and if I'm working in gold either one of them they're expensive and so I try to really see the edge and then I set up my pattern right on the edge and that's what you can see what we're doing right now I have a lot of different templates for different shapes in this case we're going to use a circle and this is going to form one layer of petals and see how that's done in a minute but right now trying to find the center like in the center now I have to figure out where five petals go columbines have five petals so I like to use a divider because I hate to try to figure out the math and that's what you've seen me doing now it's just walking that divider around trying to find out where five equal places are and I'm I'm kind of pushing down and making a little mark in there that I can see you can't see it on the camera but I can see it and that will be the tip of my five petals that's pretty clever way of doing it oh I'd hate to do the math I wouldn't even know how to do the math truthfully this is simple this is simple you just make a bigger or smaller till you end up where you started so I'm marking out just kind of rough roughly marking where the center of each of these petals are going to be this is a green lion sir by the way you guys and I love it getting ready to put a little dot a center punch in the middle of that circle and that's we're gonna drill a hole for my saw to go in during the hole where I punched the senator little divot that's in number 64 drill bit it's pretty much my go to general drill bit size because it fits most every saw blade now in marking another circle in the middle around where my drill hole was that will be the center of the flower and when I'm cutting with my saw I'll stop at that circle you'll see yeah you might be tempted to cut out that circle and then cut out the petals but if you do that it doesn't leave you anything to hold on to to attend to hold on to that Milky Way circle and especially when you're making in this small as I am in those little vignettes it makes a lotta sense to leave it attached to the most metal as possible so that you're not dropping it bending it and all the things that happen when it's you see it tight cuz you can cut if you keep your saw moving straight up and down just keep moving turn the metal why didn't you draw the petals I didn't mean to I knew where I was going and I know that there's lines then radiating from the middle are there center lines of each petal so I'm just eyeballing it plus we're making flowers in there pretty organic so if they're a little bit different from each other it's okay I don't know if you can tell but I'm pushing pretty hard just to keep that in place so that it doesn't bounce around when your saw in your sauce wants to lift up your whole project that's when you break your blades so if you're pushing down with your fingers try to keep your fingers out of the way because how many times have I cut myself I can only tell you [Music] you'll notice on my bench pin house with lots of different little slits in it different widths different depths and I move around for where I need to hold it best sometimes this is like biggest one in the middle doesn't give me the support I need so I switch to that little one you just saw me use there's that little tiny flower now I'm opening up my saw putting the blade through the hole that I drilled putting tension back in my saw so that I can cut in the center and what I want to do is cut out almost to that little inner circle not quite because I don't want my petals and fall up so I'm leaving gusta hair to keep them off and that'll be the first layer [Music] you can get back in the air with who saw like that and use it like a file it wasn't quite round my cut so I just am sort of shaving off the inside a little bit more so that it's even all around now you can just use a file or you can use sandpaper or you can go to the sink either way to get that paper off I'm using a file here so Craig has set me up with three cameras in my studio and as I just said this is my first video so try as I might they're still going to be times when I'm doing things off camera and that's the case now I can't what I what you see is that I've cut the half round wire that I described the 14-gauge half round wire into five equal lengths and I'm using my torch to ball back the ends trying really hard to make them all the same size important thing to say about when you're balling back the ends of wire no matter what why are you talking about is you have to think of gravity so if you hold this straight up and down like that the balls going to be on the end if I held it out sideways the ball would be like a drop off the end going down you follow me so now I'm taking a look how did I do are they the same size because it's going to be crucial these are going to be pedals later those need a little bit more melting so again I'm going to pick them up and I'm going to hold it straight down and just ball it back just a little bit more till they match so you're looking at that same wire that we just bought back but now what I'm doing is hammering those little balls back to become panels and so hopefully you can see if you look carefully the flat part of the half round wires up up against my bench block and I'm trying to have it in all the same amount so that they flare all the same and become pedals that are the same size now later on down the road if you've not gotten this quite right there's ways to adjust it and sand it and even cut if you need to but it's much better to take the time right here and you'll see why at this point we're just going to bend up those little flat areas that we made in the wire pretty much a right angle try to get them alike that one got bent a little bit too far down and so it was sticking up higher than the rest so now let's look there's this little teeny flower by the way this flower that you see right there is about twice the size of the ones in their little vignette so you can see that my fingers would have just been in the way you wouldn't have been able to see anything I'm feeding those little what should we call them petals I guess made of half round wire down through the middle of the petals that I made and they're sticking up and this is a little bit of a tricky part you want to make sure that because they're crowded in there and they have to be crowded they have to be tight but they also have to have room for each other to nest comfortably and not make them turn inward so that's what I'm doing it's just like is this gonna work do I need to change anything right now this is the time to take a good look because the next thing we're going to do after this isn't get it again I'm soldered in place and if they're not right when you do that there's no going back like so right okay now I'm going to let you in on the little secret this is probably like the most important secret I'm going to give you in this whole video so this is just a piece of copper wire and I'm bending into a circle I bet you're all wondering why why is she doing this hmm so I'm gonna bring the ends together because my intention is to actually solder this copper circle together right now I'm just checking to see if it's the size that I like and if it's going to line up equally on those spokes so I'm going to solder it together and I'm using handy flux because I have the best luck with handy flux if I'm working with copper or brass I don't use it when it's silver - silver but when I'm using copper to copper or copper to silver anytime I'm mixing the metals and they're not silver and gold that I'm mixing I use the handy flux I'm still using handy flex because I'm using what I just said copper to silver and I'm going to solder that circle down this is hard solder you saw your hard cider pretty much all the way through every project sometimes I use medium later if I do usually I assemble elements with hard and then in the end put the elements together with medium but I used hard as long as I can and that's just from being a jeweler for a really long time having to make repairs on other people's jewelry and really being mad when it falls apart when I put my torch on somebody else's work so I've learned to just always use hard so that the jeweler's of the future that may handle my work aren't swearing at me in my grave no piece of hard solder this is a solder pick followed up into a little ball and you can makes it really easy to place it where you want it to go if you've never used a solder pick it's the timing it's like it turns into a ball and then you go in there with a pick and if your timing is right it'll stick right to it that's the bad thing about handy flux it's really sticky so now my kettles are trapped on those books that are made of the half round wire and everything is held together before I even saw it it on the flower getting the petals kind of even spreading them out and making sure that they're round and facing the right direction because when I started the whole thing together it's going to be a lot harder to move them than it is right now so I'm just making sure that they're all sticking out at the same angle and I'm going to rotate those folks so that they stick out in between each cut pedal looks good Steelheart solder this time I'm going to switch flexes though I was using handy flex but now I'm just soldering silver - silver down there in the middle so I'll go ahead with the ban turns flux or the floor on whatever you guys call it which is it is not sticky and it works really well for when you're working with gold or when you're working with silver you can watch your flux this this kind of flux this flooring flux or ban turns whatever you want to refer to it as gets kind of black and spiderweb you looking when it's about ready to receive hard solder when we've when it's come up to the temperature where hard cider will almost melt you get this black spiderweb indication and you know that you can go in there and that the solder will be attracted to the spot to heat okay now let's let it all run keep the whole thing in general and what it's doing is its soldering the pedals to the half and one and I'm flipping it over and I'm bringing all that solder up it started attracted the heat so if I have my heat source at the top the solder is going to come up from the back and everything is stuck together now good so at this point I've pulled it off I've cleaned it a little bit in my pickling solution which is a synthetic sulfuric acid rinsed it off really good neutralized it with baking soda so that I can really handle it and I'm playing with the pedals adjusting them again making sure I like how they are and now we're doing this 20 gauge wire this is the round wire that I talked about at the beginning and cutting five lengths of that these are kind of random lanes I'm just going for longer than that circle [Music] so like we did on the half round we're going to ball back this wire it's a little bit out of focus till the end but you'll be able to see what we're doing and once again we're trying for all the balls to be the same size and all straight down from the wire so we're holding it where gravity's helping us straight down and there they are they look pretty good they look like they're all the same length so back at my other bench and everything is cold now I'll show you what we do with these guys they become the little stamen in the middle of the flower so I feed it through the center hold the little ball by the petal and bend it up to my framework make sure it's in the right place and wrap it around to secure it tighten it so it doesn't move and do the same thing with the other four I'm checking to make sure that there's sort of sticking up the same amount the same height tightening them up I think that last one was a little bit high and I had to fuss with it a little bit when I looked at it so I ended up oh that isn't the last one wait a minute I'll show you what to do if you have this problem so after I tightened it I realized that it was just a little bit higher than the other four so what I did was just took my tweezers tried to see if it made a difference if I rearrange them but I still noticed a difference even with that so I went in with my tweezer it just kind of creeped that one wire to make a difference in the lathe see and that brought it down I think you're starting to see the advantage of working with this framework we can't imagine actually doing it any other way if you were trying to solder each one of these individually which I used to do before I invented the framework with it and it was almost impossible so I don't know I guess it's experience assignment is secure each one of those let's call him stamen wires each one of those stamen wires to the frame we're still in hard solder guys Craig's doing an awesome job on this camera work for me it's in the soldering area I hope you can all see but sure looks like the details are coming through thanks honey you're welcome certainly had challenges when we shot this that's for sure but it's only our first video I know I think we did a really good job okay so I'm just making sure that all those little statement or where I wanted to be before I actually solder them in place right now we've started the statement to the frame but they're still free inside there and there we go now what you didn't see me add any solder that's because there was still enough from the original soldering when we soldered the pedals to the half round that I didn't need much more so now I'm just checking to make sure that they all really did solder with the residue from the solder that was there before and I could see there's a couple more spots that could use a little bit more so that it doesn't fall apart when I release this whole thing from the frame this is I think we're coming up to my favorite of your best shot to see all that sidecar not perfect all right fiddling with it making sure everything's even how do we do we need to go back and solder anything change anything at this point do we like it okay bending the pedals down a little opening up that flower this is also a good way to tell if everything really is soldered because you've got it you know a lot of little things in a small space and you want to make positive Shore and that you've caught every single one of them so bending down the petals a little bit I'll clean it up take over so what I'm doing right now I noticed that some of the pedals were a little bit narrower narrower than others and I wanted to spread them out so I'm squeezing down with my round nose pliers and that spreads the Miller boost enough to make them grow a little bit wider now I'm ready to take off the framework you should use the framework on other pieces in with other vignettes yeah well for a lot of things actually not just flowers they use copper because it's less expensive yeah because it's really waste right so at this point I'm trying to I'm trying to show you that it doesn't have to just be a little flower like in my vignette but if you want this is a large enough one that you could put a stone in the middle I keep a lot of tubeset gemstones just loose like that to see how they'd look into design this is what would happen how you could fit in a prong setting if you wanted to do that for a gemstone or a diamond and you could spread those statement out more for a bigger head if you wanted to use a bigger stone this is a that one right there is a three millimeter stone in the tube you can't really tell in this picture I think three millimeters too big for that flower and there's a pearl and really if you push that pearl down you can bend in the stamen and they'll hold it like prongs this is a little gold ball that I wanted to see how it might look with mixed you can't tell it's gold right now because it's so graphic that's just some options and and I would do that at this point to decide what I'm going to do with the remaining petals that are sticking out because different styles might want to be have with you know if I choose a stone in there I might want the flower to be a different style but I decided to cut them short because that's how common bites are now if this was going to be a pendant I would definitely leave one long and have it be the bail that the chain would go through I would just bend it around and solder it together and that would be the top you could also do fun other things with the ends of the like that the round wire you could bend it around and bend it back or make tendrils or do all kinds of things but for the Columbine I don't need them this is how you would do that if you wanted to and this is when you would do that if you want to do starting to be a flower in it so the only thing I'm gonna leave sticking out is the half round original kind of spikes that we put there I just need to shape them you can tell in this picture what I've cut off where I've cut it off and the things that I'm gonna shape in the next few steps but right now we're gonna solder on a stem this is 16 gauge round wire I forgot to tell you about see how I have it interlocking tweezers and I'm trying to decide right now if it's gonna stick straight out from the back or if it's gonna lay down on the side flux and I'm gonna use that stem like I use a solder joint we're still on hard cider guys so what I'm gonna do is keep that solder into a ball but I'm going to pick it up with a stem not the solder pick the reason I'm doing that is because this solder is already in place and I don't have to figure out how to place the solder at the same time I'm placing the stem so bring me that up to temperature and when you know that it's close just put this stem down and heat them together cleanup start in with my flex shaft and a little sanding disk and what I'm doing now is making those extensions pointy they're kind of they're just flat from when I cut them off and this is a sandy disk into snap-on disk that has sent sanding grit on one side this is one of the fine ones and I flip it around sometimes the sanding areas on the underside and sometimes it's on the top depending on what it is I'm working on right now I flipped it just to show you you can see it better this is a fat sharp bud burr and I'm gonna use it on the back to smooth out the hole and the stem connection and all those pedal connections there it's all solid solder back there now so I can sculpt it to be any shape to make the backside look very nice this is a nice toy you can use the point you can use the sides you can use it like a ball burr if you put it on its side and now we go to the little bristle wheels yellow is fairly coarse and what I'm doing right now is using it to take out the scratches that I had on those original petals from the file from the sand paper from the gluing of the paper at all left marks and this evens all that out this doesn't polish this just sans okay so this is important this is a tool I use all the time and it's called a craft fur I think it's KRA us showing it to you here it's a tapered as a skinny really sharp tapered file and because I'm not an engraver you know I mean with engraving tools and all that I tend to use a crossbow for when I need to engrave a line into something that's what I'm doing here I decided that I wanted to put a line down the middle of each of those petals it's really important to be stable and not slip on this and you can see that whenever I use a flex after with whatever told but particularly right now at the Krause birth my thumb is pushing against my other finger or my other thumb for stability so that nothing slips nothing moves I've got a really good grip my elbows are in to the side of my body and the only thing that's moving is from my wrist I like those lines so much I put them in the arena paddles too and at this point I decided that it would look good to sort of fluid the edges of those petals that are sticking up so I'm just squeezing the edges maybe you can see in a minute I think there's a new minion kind of feature here that we crimp the edge and it makes it kind of roughly then even more flower like because I mean this thing's made of sheet metal right but you want it to look very botanical and this is the blue wheel which takes away the scratches that the yellow wheel left and now we're starting to get kind of a matte sanded finish still not quite a Polish so thank you for watching here's another look at all those little botanicals I hope you had fun we had a lot of fun thank you so much again Craig for help make this video thanks for watching

Channel: melanie kline

Views: 119,070

Keywords: silversmithing, soldering, sterling silver, tutorial, flowers, miniatures, jewelers, metalsmith, instructions

Id: o_KIL_hpsQA

Length: 46min 25sec (2785 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020