So yesterday I’ve finished these two projects with the frogs
Where I left them last time, I have just made the setting of the frogs. Since I’ve put the ear posts and jumprings on the pendant.
Now for the earrings it was a bit tricky having already the prongs soldered. It went well thanks to the different grades of soldering material and to the ‘stop heat’ paste. I mention the different grades because without them it would be impossible to make complicated jewelry. We use 4 different grades for gold and 5 for silver, from strong soldering material to soft. We start the first solder with the strong one (if necessary and if we have several soldering steps) and we finish withbthe soft one. I might make a post one day about the soldering material.
For the pendant, it had one difficult thing, the diamond. It is possible to solder next to a diamond, ‘in general’, but with this cut it is different. With this cut there is a silver sheet under the stone to help it spark. Now the tricky point is that we can not heat the silver otherwise it will change colour and the stone will not shine as much as before, but I still had to bring a flame next to it to solder a jumpring through the chaton (setting). So to prevent the silver to overheat I’ve wrapped the setting in a tiny wet kitchen paper, so while the flame was heating the jumpring, even with the heat emanating from it the stone was protected and sucked up the water from the paper to keep it cool, preventing the silver to heat too.
Was left the second jumpring to solder and the bail, and to polish everything. The last tricky part was to set the frogs, because opals are not really strong under pressure. And it went well, not without a sweat (first time setting opals) but it is looking pretty good!
