Two silver fantasy pendants - gem setting, wire work, patina

Hi everyone,

I'm excited to finally have these done. These are gifts for important people in my life and a big learning experience for me. Photos were taken in haste with bad lighting.

The one of the left includes a wire bailed Swarovski crystal and I darkened areas by submerging the entire pendant in patina solution and polishing off / re-polishing the areas I wanted shiny. Wire was blow-torched to ball the ends.

The rose/key pendant on the right was my first attempt at gem setting - from top to bottom: opal, tanzanite, citrine. And I have to say it was a little discouraging. The bezel on the opal proved too thick (0.75mm) to easily manipulate - I would likely make this a wire in future designs to make it easier to bend. Additionally, the structure of the piece made it difficult to vise down and have good angles for pushing the bezel.

The two other gems, actually worked pretty well, but I had a hard time keeping them "down" while pushing the prongs/bezel into place. I'll have to try something different in the future (or get a better workspace).

Let me know what you think, thanks!

~Rhalin

Wow! These look fantastic!

Thanks! They were very well received! I'm trying to figure out how to make a version of them with slightly less manual labor to sell - we'll see what I manage to come up with.

--Rhalin

Hey! These are great. I'm just learning to make jewelry myself, so I love to see people who are using both digital and traditional methods to finish up their pieces.

I do have a question though, how thick are bezels typically supposed to be? I've heard before that our guidelines are too thick for bezels, and others have just glued their stones in.

Also, where did you learn 3D modeling, and where did you learn craft jewelry making? I'd love to learn more about your process

Thanks! I really want to do more of this, specifically I'm thinking of "frames" to do more ornate wire-wrapping on. I really think there's a lot of potential in mixing new and classic methods together.

(apologies for the wall of text that follows, I kind of go a bit overboard sometimes)

So, I'm still somewhat new to jewelry making myself, but my understanding is that they're typically .25mm to .35mm, but can be upwards of .5mm with dead-soft metals. I think at .5mm, the rose design may have worked if I'd pulled the bezel higher, it was just a tad too thick at .75mm (and thus too hard to bend). Again, I suspect if I made it a wire instead of a wall it would have been fine to bend, but might not have sat as tightly. I ended up having to use pliers to get the leverage I needed - and you can see in the image how it really scuffed up the metal around the opal. (I was also on a very short window of time, so a little more patience would have helped!)

I did actually end up using a dab of glue to hold the bar-set stones into place, but I don't think I had to - I just did it because of time constraints, shaky hands, and fear of losing a gem in the carpet if/when they popped out while setting.

I've been learning 3d modeling on and off since ~1997, when I got a beta invite for Rhino 3D 1.0. I can "get around" in 3D, but there's still a lot I don't know (or don't know better ways). This has mostly just been process of "I want to make X, how do I do that?" and figuring it out with methods I know, or hitting up google to see if someone has a suggestion. -Most- of what I know comes down to adding/subtracting solids to/from each other in basic shapes, creating solids out of a curve and rail to follow (and a couple other curve to solid methods), and filet/chamfering edges to finish details. It would quite literally only take a few hours or a couple days to teach what I know to someone - and I'd love to know more myself, but Rhino is a much smaller community than some of the other tools, and not a lot translates well between them.

Jewelry making has been a more recent thing. I was looking for a unique gift for my wife and found this amazing artist (https://www.sarah-n-dippity.com/gallery) and it inspired me. From there, it was just reading internet tutorials and watching youtube videos - I haven't actually applied most of this, just tinkered with some wire and tools to see what was possible, learning the basic skills involved.

Sometime during that, I came across Shapeways while looking up jewelry designs and alternate crafting methods. I've printed a few other simple things to learn the process here, and how to handle the constraints before taking the big step and trying something much more difficult and more serious as these two. All the jewelry-making learning was a great stress reliever during grad school, specifically when I was too tired to work on academic stuff, but still had energy to do "something" before sleep.

I don't tend to take little steps, and go straight from "learn basics" to "push myself well beyond what I know". These two pieces were a huge risk to print for me, because I had no idea if what I wanted to do would even work (and I wouldn't have the time (or funds) to print a second run if I mucked it up very badly). I think a good part of these coming out so well was just luck!

Additionally, I read a lot from SG Designs (https://www.shapeways.com/shops/sgdesigns) here to try to figure out the gem setting stuff - I really would like to know more about how he pulls it off, but his posts on the forums have been excellent guides.

~Rhalin

Very nice. Thanks for sharing with us.

Wow!! You've been using Rhino since 1997 -- that's incredibly impressive. Seems like you've been at this for a while!

Thanks for sharing your knowledge on the bezels. This is something i've been interested in -- and you're right, I would love it if @SGDesigns would join us in this conversation and share with us a little bit about how he manages to set stones in those massive claws around it.

I definitely here you on the 'take little steps' -- for me, this has been the hardest thing about 3D printing. I don't want to prototype, i just want to order directly in the nicer materials and hope for the best. But that's only because I'm impatient. I have only just started learning... and have been ordering prototypes for my jewelry in WSF first. But it's hard, sometimes, because I want to know exactly what it's going to be like in Metal. There's just something missing when you try it out in White first... but I guess that's how it has to be!

Thanks so much for sharing your work. I look forward to seeing more!