The making of a silver mini locket with a gold ball

Lockdown 2.0 projects! I've been working on a mini locket. Below are the progress photos and also photos of the finished item!

This is the locket before any findings were added:

 And here we have the beginning of the hinge:

 

 

This photo shows the first two side knuckles of the hinge, each about 1mm wide.

  

 

This photo shows the hinge with the middle knuckle now also attached.   

 

 

Here is the tiny bit of tube being soldered on to make the clasp on the other side of the locket:

 

 

 

This is the beginnings of the part of the clasp that will hold the locket shut.

 

  

 

This is the locket before finishing and before the hinge has been properly finished with a rivet.

 

 

Finally, here we have the finished locket. It is a mix of argentium and sterling silver, with an 18ct gold ball embedded in the front which is also visible from the inside. The silver has a brushed finish. And the cat is my parents' cat, Miles, because why not?

lace bangles

At the beginning of lockdown, I worked on several jewellery projects that had been languishing as low priority items on my bench for quite a while. One of these was a lace imprint bangle. A while ago, I made this bangle with three little claps that were meant to be reminiscent of a corset fastening:

Hm, I can see my photography skills have improved since then as well, ha! Anyway...I had been thinking for ages that I wanted to improve on the clasps with a slightly different look and a better solution for soldering them (if you look very closely at the above bangle, you can see the solder join on the wire clasp bits isn't quite rounded at one part). So, I finally got around to it and was very pleased with the result. It looks like this:

There's an inside lip under the clasp to make it really smooth on the inside for comfortable wearing. The clasps are easier to use because they have a little bobble on them, plus I like the look of them! It's quite an old fashioned clasp, often used on the side of bracelets as an extra safety clasp to make sure it can't open and fall off.

Also, I've joined Instagram, find me there: @machi_jewellery