Hello to my jewelry friends (or anyone willing to watch this video 😂). It is certainly a LONG and winding road! I wanted to capture and remember the lessons I learned while doing this challenge, and offer advice on what not to do 😁.
Here are some of the take aways:
RTFD- Read the Freaking Directions. Not Once, but several times or until your brain absorbs the information so you know exactly what the challenge entails.
Don’t procrastinate! Pay attention to the timing. I tend to think about my projects/experiments in my downtime and sometimes I spend too long on that stage and not enough on the actual physical making portion of the project. In this case, I had lots of time to do the challenge, but thought that my planning stage would take me further than it actually did. Many of my ideas were total busts and had I started earlier I could have recovered better.
When trying something new, work through it to the end before trying different variations of the same idea. In this case, had I worked through the idea of the changeable inserts for the pendant, I would have realized how impractical it was, and I would not have continued to make the other variations. Although, to be fair, I do think that soldering a micro bolt directly to an embellishment was worth the practice, and if I had bailed on the idea early I probably wouldn’t have tried that. It might be something that I could use in a different project and now I know that it can work.
If you have a boo-boo like a tiny dot of solder, just fix it during cleanup rather than trying to camouflage it. On the ring I tried to camouflage a tiny dot of solder on the bezel, and that was a road not well taken! I should have just fixed the dang thing during cleanup rather than bringing solder over everything. That created a huge mess which required even more cleanup and looked worse in the end 😒.
Pay attention to the placement of things before actually soldering. I had filed a flat spot for attaching an embellishment, and missed aligning the two. Also, rushing had a lot to do with that (see the second most important takeaway- don’t procrastinate/give yourself plenty of time!!). With hard soldering, this is less of an issue because you can heat the pieces up and reattach, but soft soldering with pewter doesn’t allow for that capability quite as easily. In general you will probably end up with a melted mess!
Doing a practice run is a great idea- again just pay attention to directions and timing so you can then follow through with the actual piece.
I also show the soft solder setup, soldering iron, solder scissors, agate burnisher, Pepetools thin urethane and embossing rubber that I used during the challenge.
