Art Jewelry Elements: sterling silver

Showing posts with label sterling silver. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Stick a ball on it!

I have a mixed media friend who has a simple go-to whenever she can't figure out what comes next in one of her designs: she says, "Stick a bird on it!" The first time I heard her say it, I realized I have a similar go-to in my arsenal: "Stick a ball on it!"

Balls in a nest

Balls on rings

Balls everywhere! (I cheated - everything except the big one was pre-formed)

Hidden balls (in 18k gold)

I realized, as part of the design intensive retreat we did with Connie Fox earlier this year, that I really - REALLY - like using balls in my designs. The "why's" of it are complicated, but the "how's" aren't, so I thought today I'd share how to make sterling silver balls so you can use them your own work. It's a super simple way to use up scrap and add some dimension without a lot of effort.

You'll need:

Sterling silver scrap
Charcoal block or solderite board
Butane torch (any size works)
Small gram scale (completely optional)

Start by laying out a small pile of sterling silver scrap on your charcoal block. If you want all the balls to be the same size, weigh your scrap on the gram scale. (Usually, I just eyeball it.) Light your butane torch and start warming up the first pile of scrap. Do this by circling around and over it, making sure to keep the block warm immediately around the scrap. The block will glow and the silver will start to melt, pulling together into a ball. Watch the silver closely - there's a "skin" of impurities that will form around the ball, when it's still a dull orange, and then burn off as the silver turns glossy and shiny. As soon as you see the ball turn shiny, start pulling the torch away.... slowly! The goal is to let the ball cool down very gradually so that the surface of the ball doesn't wrinkle up.

Wait. Let me just show you.

(As an aside, I had fun making that video. Sorry about the sound quality and editing - we'll get better at it!)

A charcoal block works best for this, though you can use a solderite board if that's what you have. The charcoal helps to retain the heat, which helps with slower cooling. And you can see that I've used this block a lot, so the center of the top has been slightly burned out. This is actually a good thing, because as the silver balls up it has a tendency to roll off the edge of the block if you aren't careful. (Ask me how I know!) That little dip helps keep it from happening.

Once you've made the ball, you need to make the bottom flat enough to solder onto your piece. Here's how I do it (thanks Melissa Muir for showing me this technique!):

(Yeah, yeah... I'm a goofball.)

One of the things I like about this technique is that once you've sanded the bottom of the ball, you can solder it in place without having to pickle or clean it further, since sanding the bottom takes off any impurities that might keep it from soldering. This means you can pickle it later with the whole piece, making cleanup much easier and reducing the number of steps in your fabrication process.

That's a win for me. The other win - and this is a big one - is that I am using and repurposing every single bit of sterling silver scrap and "waste" on my bench.

So that's how I make the balls I use in my designs - and I do it a lot! I hope this inspires you to hang onto all those little bits and pieces left over from your larger projects. And I hope you like the videos - they're kind of an experiment, so I'd love to know what you think!

Until next time -

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Safer Silver Etching

I have been desperate to try out silver etching for a long time. I love working with etched copper and wanted to create the same effects on sterling. The only problem was the chemicals involved in the process. Usually silver is etched using Nitric acid, a highly toxic and corrosive liquid which emits harmful gases while eating away at the metal. As much as I love undertaking dangerous activities, the thoughts of messing around with strong acid worry me. So I’ve been looking for a safer alternative.

My research started off looking in to different solutions for stripping the silver, I found ferric nitrate and silver nitrate. I have silver nitrate in my ever growing collection of raw materials for glaze mixing so I decided to go with that. Silver Nitrate is still a hazardous substance and should be treated with care. I wear a mask when mixing it and rubber gloves. Silver Nitrate won’t do any harm if it touches your skin as a diluted solution, it’s actually used for certain skin treatments, but it will stain your hands a lovely shade of brown, it won’t be apparent at first, but it’s light sensitive so the minute you go out in the sun, they will change colour… ask me how I know! It is also dangerous if you get it in your eyes. Always take proper safety precautions and use common sense!

To etch with silver nitrate you also need a power source and a few other bits and bobs which I will tell you about as we go along. The power source listed was a bench supply, I have one of those, but I wanted to try and see if the process worked the same as salt water etching, so I'm going battery powered!

So to start, I cut as close to a circle of silver as I could, and also cut a dreamcatcher design in vinyl to use as a resist. You can use all sorts of things to mask with, pnp paper, stop out fluid, and ironed on toner. But I haven’t had chance to test how they work yet, so I went with what I know!

Here’s the silver ready to go with the areas I don’t want to be etched masked out. I also masked the back of the disc.

The silver piece needs to be suspended in the silver nitrate solution, so for this I used Aluminium wire wrapped around the edge so it was touching the silver and taped it on from the back.

The other supplies needed are a steel bowl, (I used a small water bowl from the pet shop) a D size battery and holder with terminals (not sure of the proper name for that!), a couple of crocodile clips attached to the positive and negative of the holder with copper wire, and a bamboo skewer.

100ml of water was put in to the bowl and I added 1 gram of silver nitrate. Always add dry ingredients to wet to save splashes! Stir with an old spoon until the crystals have dissolved, and the mix is ready to go.

The bamboo skewer is placed across the bowl and the aluminium wire bent around it to suspend the silver so that it’s fully submerged, but not touching the metal of the bowl.

The negative wire from the battery is clamped on to the metal bowl, and the positive is connected to the aluminium wire to complete the circuit. Once both crocodile clips are attached to the battery, the etching process will start. It’s not as fast a process as if you were using nitric acid. I left the silver in for about an hour to get a shallow etch, it could have probably done with twice that!

If the etch is working you will see a grey fur appearing on the wire and the silver. You can see here how dirty the solution gets as it etches. To reuse it, you need to strain all the bits out and pour it into a bottle for storage. (I swapped the wire over before this picture for copper, as I wasn’t sure if it was working. I didn’t realise that the aluminium wire was coated, so after sanding it off, I switched back and it worked fine!)

I’ve been looking around for information to dispose of the solution and bits safely. When you’re finished with it, the solution can be neutralised using table salt. The advice given is to add salt until no more white precipitate is produced and then hand it over to your local hazardous waste disposal facility, the same as you would with ferric chloride used for copper. It has also been suggested that as it is silver, photography shops can help you get rid of it safely, as they send in their spent chemicals to companies that recover the silver.

So after the hour, I couldn’t wait any longer and took out the silver piece.

This is how it looked when I first took it out. After a scrub with a scourer, I treated it with liver of sulphur to bring out the texture and sanded back lightly to reveal the pattern.