A Metal bead making day.

Hello my friends,

This week at my jewelry class at NMIT I commenced working on making a lentil shaped metal bead.
Working with copper, I could texturise the metal in any way I desired.

I totally love the textured effects that can be achieved from putting metal through a roller so decided to experiment a little while I had the use of the roller to hand.

Violet leaf and elm leaf for drying.

I dried some leaves in the microwave using a little flower press I have. This amazing little thing called a Microfleur flower press dries leaves in 20 seconds! The wonderful thing about it also, is that the color of the plant/flower remains.. so it is great to use for cards etc. I used the elm leaf to put through the roller and texture some metal.

I used an orange bag to texture this bead. Unfortunately I had to file some of this bead on the left and I lost some of the pattern. I was excited that I actually managed to solder this together at home... so not a total fail! We used a process called 'sweat soldering', something that is new to me.... and it is a little fiddly to say the least. In my haste to put the above bead together, I put the pattern on each side opposing each other ! Groan.... another lesson learnt!

This smaller bead was texturised through the roller with fine copper mesh that I had on hand. The pattern worked out nice and crisp. I also used some of this in the bead above in the silver insert. I was going for a crocodile kind of look on the larger bead... almost got there! I have also learnt that it is not such a good idea to have the pattern going right to the edges... if you need to file... the loss of design is obvious. Also some solder went in to the pattern on this one.....

The larger lentil on the right was textured with the elm leaf from the flower press.This is my favorite of the day and the bead that went well during the making from beginning to end. All the other lentil shaped beads have a little something that is not quite right....  they were  certainly my 'teachers'. As time consuming as these are... I am quite excited by both the process and the result. I am already planning more...

Until next time,

Jenni