Eric Designs Jewelry

In my last post I wrote about breaking out of a design funk for a pendant I needed to make. On Saturday I started working on that pendant. My first thoughts were to texture the metal being used for the pendant. The main stone is a pietersite (a dark stone with streaks of gray and gold with areas light blue). Since pietersite is a fibrous stone I decided to texture with a fiber background. I took out a spool of string and laid it across the silver in an interesting and flowing pattern. Then I placed a sheet of copper over the silver, sandwiching the string in between. Through the rolling mill it went.

What came out on the other side was not what I wanted. The string unwound producing an indention of spirals, somewhat like a strand of DNA. It was interesting, but not what I wanted.

The next thought was to use the etching materials I had purchased but not really used. So I cut a new thicker piece of silver to use for the pendant. There is a good reason why using the etch resist is like painting with tar. It is tar! It has to be thinned to be useable. Next I painted strokes of the resist onto the silver. Then set it aside to dry.

Once the resist was dry into the acid bath it went. I checked the piece at thirty minutes. There was a good etch happening, but I wanted it a bit deeper. Another 20 minutes went by and I checked again. The etch was right where I wanted it. Off to the sink to rinse away the acid, followed by a bath of baking soda and water, and lastly a dip in water and ammonia. The very last step required a lot of elbow grease to scrub off the etch resist.

Here are the lessons I learned from etching this pietersite pendant. Use a pair of gloves when moving the metal from acid bath to the sink to rinse. The acid doesn’t burn or itch, but it does stain! On Saturday I had white splotches on my fingers and hands. On Sunday they had turned to a light shade of gray. Today, Monday, they are a dark, almost black, gray.

As for the pendant, I did not get to finish it. My torch ran out of acetylene and while it produced a flame, it wasn’t hot enough to melt the solder. I’ll need to leave work early today so I can get the tank refilled.  I won’t get a chance to finish until Wednesday because I have hockey games on Monday and Tuesday night.