Jewelry Making

Lauri teaches several different types of jewelry making classes. Last week, I took her silver pendant class. The silver comes in a clay form. You roll it and use templates to make the pendants. You have to work fairly fast, as the clay dries quickly. The pendants are fired in a kiln and the non-silver material burns off. The pendants are then polished. I haven't seen the finished product yet, as Lauri's tumbler is on the fritz. She is hoping someone from the States can bring another one down. She has been shaking the tumbler by hand and it takes a LONG time. Since I will be here for awhile, I'm in no hurry.

Today we made pendants from dichroic glass. I had seen this glass before, but didn't know anything about it. Here is information I got from Wikipedia. Lauri told us all this, but I couldn't remember.

Dichroic glass is glass containing multiple micro-layers of metal oxides which give the glass dichroic optical properties. It was developed by NASA for use in satellite optics and spacesuit visors. 

It has multiple ultra-thin layers of different metal oxides (gold, silver, titanium, chromium, aluminum, zirconium, magnesium, silicon) which are vaporised by an electron beam in a vacuum chamber. The vapour then condenses on the surface of the glass in the form of a crystal structure. This is sometimes followed by a protective layer of quartz crystal. The finished glass can have as many as 30 to 50 layers of these materials, yet the thickness of the total coating is approximately 30 to 35 millionths of an inch. The coating that is created is very similar to a gemstone and, by careful control of thickness, different colors are obtained.

The main characteristic of dichroic glass is that is has a transmitted color and a completely different reflected color, so it can look a different color at different angles. Dichroic glass can be fused with other glass in multiple firings. Due to variations in the firing process, individual results can never be exactly predicted or duplicated, so each piece of fused dichroic glass is unique. Dichroic glass is specifically designed to be hotworked, but can also be used in its raw form. 

This is an example of a dichroic glass pendant that I got off of the internet. 

For Lauri's class, we used her kiln and made our pendants with different pieces of regular glass and dichroic glass.

Lauri poured out all her glass fragments for us to choose from.

Here are some of the tools that Lauri uses to cut glass.

This is my pendant pre-firing. It will look totally different after it is fired. The flash from my camera washed it out some. A clear piece of glass, that is slightly larger, is laid over the top of this and it all fuses (melts) together.