Image courtesy of Gemexi.

Not all my pendants get names. I read somewhere once that romanticizing your work by naming your creations would help to appeal to people. I tried it for a while and couldn’t really get behind it. Besides, coming up with a good name for something that isn’t just absolute blather is hard.

Looking at this pendant now, I’m no more inspired to name it than I was when I made it.

The pendant started, as most of my pendants do, with the agate. It’s actually a pretty nice piece of Montana Agate. But the really prized pieces will have inclusions that look like something … like a tree or a landscape or buildings.

Still, I liked the rough piece enough to shape it and grind it and polish it to perfection.

I was inspired to add the balls of silver to the pendant because, first, it mirrored the globular inclusions. And then, two, I had a lot of scrap sterling and had been playing with the torch and balling up the scrap.

I like to combine copper and silver for the juxtaposition of the colors. Copper is warm and silver is cool and they complement each other nicley. And, to me, too much silver by itself can get boring. I like colorful stuff.

The faceted plagioclase came from Bernd’s collection of gemstones. It is 5.28 carats and is a fairly nice example of plagioclase.

I hand fabricated all of the metal parts, excepting the basket mounting for the plagioclase. That also came from Bernd’s stock. Well, I did not make the silver sheet from which I cut the back plate, or the bezel wire. Or the copper wire. Shoot, kind of messes with the concept of handmade.

Amazon has a shop called Amazon Handmade and along with each listing, they have this “disclaimer.” It reads “This item was handcrafted, hand-designed, or hand-altered with love.” To me that sounds like someone could buy a pendant made in china and hang it from a chain they purchased somewhere else and call it “hand-altered” and then sell it on Amazon Handmade. Because I’m kind of literal, I often wonder about calling anything hand-made. Especially in these modern times of automation. But that’s picking nits and I try not to do that too much.

So, getting all the parts soldered together without undoing any of the previous solders took some clever planning. Typically, you would use hard solder for the first join. Then medium solder for the next. Easy solder melts at a lower temperature than the first two. But I was going to have at least four joins and so I had to use extra easy solder paste for the final join.

I typically sketch my ideas and I will do a breakdown, in sketches, of how I want the solders to go. To be honest, it doesn’t always go the way I hope it might. But I always chose to think of it as serendipitous, as it often leads me to create something even nicer than my plan. Goes the other way too from time to time. Luckily, not often.

This pendant was one of those that turned out nicer than I anticipated.

I was a biology major at university. I took a lot of lab classes. I kept excellent lab notes and always got good grades on my lab notebooks. That training and discipline has helped in my jewelry making in that I keep good notes on everything I make as I go along. What worked and what didn’t are some of the things I value most in the moment. But after time has gone by, I value other things like how I felt about the piece as I was making it.

Each piece I make is unique. I don’t like making multiples of things. I don’t even enjoy working in a series. Bernd likes to work in series and has made a lot of very nice pendants that vary only by the stone he sets in them. But that’s not me.

I’m like that in life too. I always want to know what’s over the next rise. I’m always looking for the new thing, new thought, new way of looking at life.

I learn something from each piece of jewelry I make. And I learn something from each new day that I live. Life is good.

Please visit our Etsy shop to see more of our wonderful creations. Also, we’ve added a Clearance section with some great bargains in it. You can find it at jewelrybysyzygy.etsy.com