silver in the hand
The finished product

I had scoured the shops looking for a piece of jewellery that had some meaning for me. After being disappointed and realising that no shop would make a piece for me (minimum order of 20), I decided I would try to make it myself.

I wanted to incorporate three elements that represented my three children – Olive, Jetson, and Casper. With some inspiration from Rob, and some time spent fiddling with the design, I was ready to book my class. Since it was the school holidays, I wanted Olive to try it as well. It took her all of 10 minutes to design her piece, so we were ready to go.

The final design
The final design

The local library, Pondok Pecak run many different classes, and silver-making is just one of them. The first step is choosing the thickness of the silver sticks, which I sanded thin at the ends to get the shaped look of the 3 letters. It was amazing how hot the silver becomes when filing it, hence the gloves!

spinning wheel
specialised tools required

Next is to shape the sticks of silver to the letters, this was rather fiddly, requiring a little help with getting the curves of J, C and O smooth and rounded. The pieces were then soldered together with a blowtorch. Next, the piece was cooked in some lime water until boiling, cooled and scrubbed to clean it up, then finally adding silver polish it was buffed using the same machine as above, but with a much softer attachment.

lemon silver
Soaking them with lime juice

Olive had another step of adding some dots of silver to her piece, which she glued on with a special silver glue, and then melted on with the blow torch.

silver-olive
OLive modelling her silver design

I was pleasantly surprised at how shiny and lovely the final pendant looked. I couldn’t believe I just made it myself… well with a bit of help! It will be something I will treasure forever.

silver me
Clare’s final design

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