Ridonculous.

I know, it’s not a real word.  But it fits.

I had this vision when I was walking earlier this week. I’d seen some stone cairns in a stream at the park I like to walk at, and I thought they would make awesome pendants.  I didn’t get a picture of those actual cairns, but you get the idea. These are at Jenny Lake, near Jackson, WY.

cairns

So I thought, rather than make stones or blobs, I’d try making silver discs, and “flute” them a little.  I cut out 7 discs, annealed them, and drilled holes in the centers.  Here’s a pic of how I get them lined up so I can drill them without drilling my fingers.  The tape holds them in place on the wood block, and there’s a little divot in each disc to drill. I didn’t want them exactly centered, to get the offset and random look.

IMG_2043

(Well, technically, I’ve already drilled the holes here.)

Next, I went to town with a pliers. They ended up looking more like petals than stones, but I liked the effect.  After getting a nice little ball on the end of some 18g wire, I threaded all of the discs on it.  My original intent was to have them able to move around, but it really didn’t work out well. So I decided to solder the disc/petals to the wire.

Pretty much disaster. The wire wasn’t flush to the holes I’d drilled, and I couldn’t get the solder to stick. After working with it and getting two discs to stick, but the next one I soldered cause all of the previous ones to unstick, rinse and repeat about 12 times, I decided to try a larger gauge of wire.  16g to the rescue!

Better – I still had some difficulty in keeping previous disc/petals soldered when I heated up subsequent ones (even though I followed the rule of starting out with hard solder and working my way back to medium, and then easy) – but while I had to re-solder a few disc/petals, eventually I was down to the last one.

IMG_2045Here’s where I left it when I locked up the studio tonite.  The top disc/petal still isn’t on there solidly, but I just had to walk away. I REALLY like the concept however, and I’m excited to go back and finish it up.  Going to be a pendant, and I think I’ll work on the concept a bit more and see where I can go with it.