Today’s project is more ambitious. I decided to set a stone, most likely for a pendant. When I looked at my stones, I really liked the way two of them look together, so I am going to make a piece that uses both.
One is a rectangle of chrysocolla, beautiful teal green/blue. The other is an oval opal – Mexican, maybe? It’s a lovely clear fiery orange.
The main exercise for today was making the bezels. You can buy bezel wire, but I like to cut my own out of sheet metal (26g fine silver) that’s a little heavier than the bezel wire you can buy. It took some practice and “oh, yeah, that’s how that works” to get the first one right, then the second one was easy.
Now I just have to think about how I want the actual piece to be arranged. I have some ideas, but I’m going to let it percolate overnight.
The stones aren’t actually set yet, that’s the very last thing that happens. In this picture they are just resting in their bezels.