A Sassy Conspiracy

After posting the necklaces I made for my girlfriends on craftster, I was commissioned by a craftster user in San Diego to make three more. I finished the order early this morning, and I’m pretty proud. They took about an evening each – its a fairly labor intensive process, drawing them, drilling pilot holes, cutting them out with a handsaw, refining the shape with needle files, and then lots of polishing.

I got to use my tumbler for the first time too and WOW. I am so impressed! They are so shiny! I had purchased a rock tumbler from Micheals (this one) with a gift certificate that elektrafying and pookzilla gave me for christmas, and boyfriend bought me some mixed stainless steel shot from Dowd’s to convert the tumbler into a jewelry polisher. For those who would like to try this, here’s some information: I used about 1lb of shot (be sure to get mixed shapes), which was washed in a fine strainer with dish soap and rinsed well. Put the shot in the tumbler, add your pieces, a squirt of dish soap and enough water to submerge all the contents. Seal the drum and start tumbling! I let it run for about 2 hours (had to get up at 2am to shut it off) and that seems to have been plenty of time. Afterwords the shot should be washed again, carefully dried and then stored in an airtight container for the next time. This went a long way to making my pendants look more professional – I couldn’t get anywhere close to that shine after hours of polishing. The pieces still needed to be thoroughly hand polished to take out any scratches though, so it didn’t really cut back on the work, just added that professional finish that had previously elluded me. An added benefit to the tumbling (or so I read) is that the process work hardens the metal, which is great since sweat soldering them annealed the metal and made it soft.

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