A jewelry saw is a pretty special tool.  Its blade is so thin it can be tough to see which way the teeth are pointing so I do it by feel.  But that fineness is what enables you to create amazing detail.  The first thing I attempted was the state of Michigan (just the lower peninsula) about 3 inches tall from a piece of 18 gauge aluminum.  I couldn't believe how good it looked and how quickly I finished it. I was hooked. Turns out it was dumb luck that I chose a project and materials that made it deceptively easy.  Aluminum is very easy to cut. I found out later that thick metal I used is much easier to cut because it's stable and doesn't bounce around as you push the saw against it.  Now the shape may seem intimidating but as I learned on my next project, it is so much easier to create organic flowing lines with a saw rather than straight lines or symmetrical designs. Any tiny variation on the latter is immediately obvious. If I was off a tat on part of Michigan's uneven shoreline I just curved back the other way and nobody was any the wiser.  And finally the size was ideal. Past a certain point, the smaller your finished product the harder it is to cut in all your tiny details.  For example, the bronze Michigan on the bottom left is less about 3/4 inch tall and was much tougher to cut. And of course, past a certain point, the larger it is the more unwieldy it is and the longer it takes to navigate with that tiny blade. 

Something I'll be comparing in posts about metal sawing is different ways to get your design on the metal.  With each project I tried a new method and I'll detail others in future posts.  Each seemed to have its own pros and cons. Here I hand drew the design on a piece of paper. When I was happy with it I cut it out and rubber cemented it to a circle of copper. You need to make sure the cement is totally dry  before you begin or it can goop up your saw and/or move around as you work.  If you want to create your own design, I'd say the wait time is the only down side of this method.  You can also use double-sided carpet tape or a glue stick.  I had trouble with the edges coming up when I tried a glue stick but I read about people liking them so maybe I'm doing something wrong.

The middle picture shows the design cut out and the paper template removed, but there is still a lot of filing and sanding ahead to smooth all those edges.  I was dismayed to discover this takes a lot longer than the actual cutting.  The good news is that I've since learned ways to create designs that are more efficient for filing, have some handy new tools, and practice helps a lot.

This was my first sawing project that involved piercing. That is, not just sawing around an edge (like the Michigan earrings) but a design that has holes in the interior.  The secret is drilling little holes wherever you need to remove metal.  Then you detach one end of your saw blade and slip it through the recently drilled hole, reattach it to your saw frame, and start sawing.  For each separate area you repeat the process.  It's a little tricky but fun and oh so rewarding.

After finishing my filing and polishing, then attaching my handmade bale with a rivet, I thought I was just about done in the picture on the right.  Then I noticed how far off to the left my rivet had traveled during the attachment process (see the green arrow).  Turns out it was just the first of three bales that I put on and then cut off this pendant.  It took many more problems with several more pendants/bales before I finally discovered 3 separate issues that were contributing to my wonky rivet problem.  I was going to explain them here but frankly, the memories are still too painful.  Usually I'm having big fun when I'm trying new things in the studio - but occasionally I'm contemplating mayhem with perhaps just a little murder thrown in, too.


In retrospect I'm glad I wasn't finished when I thought I was. Besides the wonky rivet I was disappointed in the piece.  I first drew a tree silhouette in the middle of circle waaaay back in college and loved it.  (It was for an environmental paper and I recall the professor suggesting I could have gotten an A on it if I'd spent a little less time on the cover picture and a little more time on my footnotes.  Pish - where were that man's priorities ?!) That combo has stayed close to my heart and I've attempted to recreate it in several mediums since.  I'd been itching to try it in sheet metal and figured when I finally learned how, it would be pretty thrilling. I'd put in lots of work and learned a lot but when I looked at it I just felt ... meh.   That's where the third part of my title comes in: Finishing Details.  It was while I toiled on the bale issues that the pendant told me it needed to be domed, smooth finished, antiqued, and textured. (Wish it had told me it needed to be domed before I finally got a bale properly attached - would have been a lot easier.)  Here are the results above and below.  As usual, you can click on any picture for a larger view.

What a difference! It may not seem like it to someone else, but for me the changes took me from a disappointed "meh" to an excited and satisfied buzz.  The longer I work with metal, the more techniques I learn, and the more natural it seems to know what a piece needs - to give me that buzz anyway.  There are a multitude of finishing detail techniques to learn about in the world of metal and I'm thoroughly enjoying adding each new one to my skill set.

This piece moved to my wall at the gallery (AuSable Artisan Village Gallery & Art Center) and sold a few months ago.  I was actually a little sad when I saw it was gone.  We'd been through a lot together.  I hope it went to a good home and I'm glad I took pictures to remember the experience.

Fold forming is a technique of metalworking in which you fold sheet metal, forge it (form with a hammer), torch it, then unfold it.  Depending on your final design, you may repeat these steps multiple times.  Because of metal's unique properties it will stretch and compress during this process, yielding wonderful new 3D shapes.  One of my favorite fold formed projects, and one of the simplest, is making leaves.  You can make many different shapes and sizes using the same basic steps and techniques.  For example, the same techniques were used to create both leaves shown here, but the results are quite different.  The one on the far left is about 4 inches long and it's main/center vein is tucked behind the leaf.  Its shape is asymmetrical, flowing, and sinuous.  The one to its right is about an inch long, it's center vein juts forward, and the form is symmetrical.  

Here's an overview of how I make fold formed leaf earrings.  If you want them to match you can create paper patterns like I did here, but freehand cutting yields great designs, too.  I'm showing 3 different patterns here to demonstrate how varied you can make them.  First I cut strips out of 26 gauge copper. At #1 I've drawn a line just a tad wider than the widest part of the leaf so I know what size to cut the strip.  At #2 I've completed that step on another piece, then folded the cut copper strip in half.  Then I traced the pattern shape on it (also folded).  

The next step is to cut out the leaves. Twenty-six gauge copper sheet is pretty thin so I usually just use metal shears.  But with this one I also used a jewelry saw because it has a tricky inside curve that can be hard to navigate cleanly with shears. 

Here I've cut a couple of different shapes and some have been hammered to create the leaf shape that will emerge in the next step.  I had trouble getting the light right to show this, but the leaves that look somewhat like swords were hammered with a very narrow hammer head.  The shorter leaves have wider blows of a different hammer. Clicking on the picture to see a larger version may make it more clear.  You get varied effects depending upon which hammer shape you choose, how hard you hit, at what angle, which edge you hit (the folded or open edge), and how many times. These leaves should be a good demonstration of that when they're finished.
  
Also shown is a steel block on which I hammer the piece, a couple of typical fold-forming hammers, and the head of a rotary tool with a sanding disk to help smooth sharp cut edges.  It's optional at this stage but you'll need to do some edge smoothing before you're finished. Sometimes I wait until the end to clean up a piece but it seems more often I do lots of little cleanups as I go.

Ironically, that's almost always my plan for how I'll work in the studio, too.  Just clean as you go, Nancy. Use a tool or material, then put it away.  How simple!  But it never continues through a whole project.  At some point I always stop and look around in stunned silence.  How did all that stuff get out, and over there, and over there, and under that?  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, kids. Creating art is NOT always pretty ... or even hygienic I suspect.

All that hammering work hardens the metal and makes it brittle so it needs to be annealed (heated to soften) before attempting to unfold it.  Here you see one leaf that has just reached the lovely red glow of annealing temperature so I'm pulling the torch away.  At the bottom are the other three waiting their turn. They quickly cool with a dip in cold water (quenching) and are ready for handling.  In their newly malleable state you can pry open the fold. The earlier hammering stretched and textured the metal in such a way that it is pretty easily coaxed into a leaf shape as you unfold.   The movement of unfolding and additional hammering hardens the copper again and you have a nice solid leaf ready to be surface finished and, in this case, made into earrings.  

The final step for any of my earrings is always attaching argentium sterling silver earring wires.  Argentium sterling is more expensive than regular sterling silver but the fact that it doesn't tarnish like traditional sterling makes it worth the extra cost.  I switched to silver earwires for copper or bronze earrings, too, because many people seem to have skin problems with non-silver or gold earwires.  I discovered that making them slim and quite simple helped insure the silver doesn't detract from the copper or bronze of the jewelry.

Clicking the pictures below will produce close ups of the earrings made for this blog post.  Note how each are shaped uniquely and have different numbers and shapes of hammer blows.  But the process to create them was essentially the same with only little tweaks at certain steps.  I do love how copper moves!  While you can fold form many metals (given strong enough tools and arms) copper has the ideal metal moving properties for this technique.  

These earrings, along with a number of other new pieces, will be available in my AuSable Designs shop at the AuSable Artisan Village Gallery (AAV) this week.

I'll be teaching Fold Forming classes this fall through the AAV Gallery and Art Center.  They'll include additional things not detailed in this post along with lots of tips and hands-on practice. The classes will be small (4-5 students max) and held in my Roscommon jewelry studio.  You will sign up through the AAV and the fees help support the non-profit center.  More information will be available both on this site and the AAV site in early fall of 2014.