Some days...

 Some days are diamonds, some days are stone goes the song I think.

I had a couple of stone sessions in amongst my making in the last wee while that's for sure!

This first one was because I wasn't thinking and went ahead and messed things up. The second was more because I didn't really trust myself, figuring I was the problem when in fact something else was the real culprit...

I did some writing - handwriting - in black on white paper and headed off to then do my overlay with white acrylic ink.

Tick! That worked well.

I then decided I'd do a half and half leaving the top half of the paper with the white ink over single lines of writing, whilst overlaying writing on the second half. Looking all good so far.

And then I completely forget myself! I forgot to let the black ink dry and went straight in over it with the white ink and got a blurry grey mess!

A very good reminder to pause and pay attention. I have managed to kind of sort of rescue it in a fashion.

I had a brilliant afternoon on Saturday soldering merrily and making great gains. Oh my, did I have plans!

The beginnings of a smaller pebble pendant. It was all going along OK until I decided once again that I would fiddle with the jump ring. This time I wanted to flatten it thru the mill and make it look different, and that all went well.

Until soldering time. I tried absolutely everything I could think of - I varied how I held the piece, I used three different types of solder approaches (sheet, wire and paste); I used three different strengths of soldering (easy, medium and hard) and no way would it work.

Poor Barry had to come and help out, give me some tips, maybe try this, or try that kind of thing. It was so frustrating.

I decided to leave the jump ring unsoldered, and popped it in the pickle to clean up all the residue of heating.

And this is what happened! I had magically turned silver into copper! Which is not generally the direction with metals you would ever want to head - silver being worth that bit more than copper...

So I worked out that the jump ring I had tried to solder was probably silver plated copper or brass, not sterling silver. A very good lesson to learn.  

Which meant I was quicker on the uptake when these three rings wouldn't solder, just deformed on their surface instead. Ahhh now I know, it's not sterling silver.

I had been using a little bag of bits I had been gifted and have now worked out I should really only make work with things that I know for sure are sterling silver.

I am cleaning the pendant up, polishing and buffing it to remove the coat of copper and am hopeful that it will look gorgeous and silvery soon.

Days of diamond and stones. Days of silver and copper!