New earrings

Be looking for a new pair of Texas-style earrings at the site soon. I have already fired and semi-polished them, have received the order of blue topaz stones, and once my husband lets me off the hook helping him with work and I get my dapping block back from Lisa, I will finish these! I wanted to make something that was kind of flashy. That hasn’t been my style in the past, but evolution is a good thing, even darting down and then back up a side road now and then…I want to see if these earrings generate any interest. They are not an outlandish design (some might think a large silver disk isn’t adventurous at all!) but the disk is indeed a large one, which is a stretch for me.

After making the model from polymer clay, I formed the mold and then used it to shape the disks using metal clay three cards thick. The earrings fired nicely thin, and they are not too heavy, even with the Texas shape slightly raised. The dapping block will help re-shape one that did not fire perfectly concave. The swirl lines were drawn on the wet clay with a needle tool. I will bezel-set the stones and then polish Texas to a high shine, leaving the semi-polished finish surrounding the state, the finish earlier achieved in the tumbler. I should have re-shaped the out-of-whack disk before tumbling, since it is now work-hardened, but I think it will hammer out just fine.

The picture above was drawn in Adobe Photoshop, one of my other most favorite pastimes. You should see what I did with “American Gothic” lately, for my father-in-law’s birthday! Posted only by request!

P.S.– I got my dapping block left and the earring tapped out perfectly. I will start on the bezels today or tomorrow! Also, I left out a MOST IMPORTANT detail: blue topaz is the Texas state stone! It is mined in Mason County in the Texas hill country.