New Sea Glass Earrings

December 4th, 2010

This week I’ve been busy making new work for the Four+ exhibition that is on this weekend. Due to all the snow we’ve had I was very doubtful if I was going to be able to drive to East Wemyss on Friday, but was hopeful that it’d be fine and so continued to create and just kept an eye on the weather forecast.

One thing I said I’d make for the exhibition was some sea glass jewellery from glass that I source locally from the beaches along the coast here in Kinghorn. I already had a couple of rings in stock and so I thought I would make some earrings too. In the past I’ve made earrings using balled silver wire to echo the designs of the rings and pendants I make like this:

I’ve changed the design this week as the drilling process often chips the glass around the hole and a piece of balled silver doesn’t always cover this up so you end up with lots of drilled glass that can’t be used. I use the smallest diamond coated drill I can find – must have a hunt and see if I can get something smaller, in which case this design can come back. So I thought of another way to make the earrings, so there is less waste.

I cut small pieces of annealed 2mm silver wire and hammered these flat to form small discs of silver. I then soldered these onto the pieces of wire cut to form the earwires. These were then sanded and polished. To save time I made myself a little wooden jig [is that the right word?] by drilling lots of small holes through it, so that I could thread a few pieces into it and sand and polish more than one piece at a time.

And here they are…

I then paired up all my pieces of drilled sea glass and starting forming them into earrings.

And here are some of the finished earrings…

These earrings are on sale over the weekend at 4+, an exhibition on in East Wemyss, Fife. More info here:

http://www.fourplus.biz/

Posted in Work In Progress |