Having fun in my metals class

I have been taking metals classes since 2006 and I LOVE them but it was very funny that since then I never had a class about etching, cold joins and inlay.
When I knew this class was going to be open in South West School of Art and Craft given by Gary Schott, I was very excited.
We did etching using a saline solution that can etch your metal in one hour ! I was surprise to see how fast and easy this can be. I love the texture I got in my copper metal piece.


I had a 2.5 inches by 2.5 inches piece of copper etched and I love the final results, when I had my piece I started to look for possibilities to make a jewelry piece with the etching.

This is what I came out with ! I will be attaching my etched metal to the brass with three brass rivets. This is going to be a necklace. The brass chain that will be added in my piece will have Mexican Milagros charms hanging from it.




The inlay technique was very fun to make. I used a copper sheet and soldered brass wire to it for the inlaying. When I had my piece finish I decided to make hearts with it.
As you may have notice already ;-} I am obsess with hearts. I will never get bored with making them, every heart I make has a very particular feeling and I really like that.

This was my first piece I made with my inlay. The heart was attached to the brass with the stilt tab technique that I learned during our cold joins section of the class.



These earrings were attached by soldering the hearts to the brass metal.




My final piece with my inlay is this big Heart pendant. I used the stilt tab connection in this piece too.

I also learned to do reticulation in this class but to be very honest with you ;-} I was not very good at it !!!! I love the look of the reticulation in silver but I will have to keep working on that.
With my reticulation I will make a ring. I will post my ring project in a later day.
In general I was very happy on this class, I learned a lot of new techniques that I am sure I will be using a lot in my future designs.
Thanks Gary for such a wonderful class !!!!!