Jewellery - WIP Holly leaf Necklaces

So I think I'm finally getting the hang of photographing Jewellery now and one thing I have done which is a great help is buy a decent android phone, and as it turns out, it actually has a really nice camera so I decided I would maybe take some WIPs of my Jewellery stuff so you can see exactly how it's all put together. I'm making three pairs of holly leaf necklaces currently and I'm halfway there now, they're soldered together but I need to clean everything up, polish it and then get the sea bamboo beads onto the extra wire I have on the leaves.

So here's how I did the first part of it, I had to spend quite a bit of time cutting out and filing my leaves so they were smooth and pointed. My teacher showed me that you can do this just by drawing a template on double sided sticky tape for the first one and then you just scratch out an outline on the metal after that.

Next we cut some round wire and match it to the leaves so they look like stalks, the measuring is always important for stuff like this as you need to leave a bit of extra metal for soldering. After that, the stalks get soldered on to the actual leaf base.

left leaf - bad solder, right leaf - good solder

Since we've just done a bit of soldering on the leaves already we then had to put them into a pickle solution which cleans up the metal surface. People who mess around with circuit boards and so on will know about this, but when soldering you're actually using metal and fusing it together with heat so if there are bumps and impurities and so on everywhere the solder won't run between the gaps properly and melt together the right way.

You should be able to see if you look closely enough, I bet welders in particular will see what I've done, some of them came out really clean and nice with the soldering but then others I botched a bit and had to rescue them one I got particularly annoyed with as you can see from the burn marks on the metal in the fourth photograph but overall it got fixed.

Here they are cleaned up after the pickle solution does the work, now, I need to go and solder the pairs together to make them look more like holly leaves.

Soldered together in pairs so now they're starting to look like holly leaves, now we put them in the pickle solution again.

So hopefully you can see I'm almost there now, like I said, I've got a bit more soldering and so on to do, then polishing and then finally we put on the sea bamboo berries that some of you may have seen in one of my earlier posts where I showed the finished product.