Shinium - Brilliance by Design

So, I make quite a few tutorial videos and people always say "yeah, that's cool but what if I don't have all that gear" Well, hopefully this video addresses that problem.

I was asked by some friends recently if I could make them some wedding rings from electrum. Electrum is an alloy of gold and silver, and it's incredibly pretty. But it's kind of hard to work - the standard way of making a ring, by folding a piece of sheet or wire and soldering it closed doesn't work. While electrum is very hard, it has a relatively low melting point, so you can't use normal silver solder on it (also, silver or gold solder would show up as a visible join). I have fused a few rings from sheet electrum, but it's very hard to get a clean join - the ring ended up slightly asymmetric , which isn't always a problem but for wedding rings it didn't seem right. So, time to learn how to cast metal. I bought a Delft Clay Casting kit and got to practising. After a few goes I dived right on in to making the rings. It's a fairly simple process but an interesting one. First up, making a wooden former which is slightly smaller on the inside and sli...

A non-jewellery post, for a change. We were running a bit short on shelving in the kitchen and wanted somewhere we could store all the preserves we're going to make from the garden this year, so we went to the timber yard to see what they had. They had this, 155cm long piece of chestnut. It was pretty heavily cracked and pitted, with knotholes and so on. But, I had a plan. Resin inlay. A technique traditionally used with a colour-matched epoxy to the wood, to give an "invisible" repair. I'm taking a slightly different approach. First job, seal off the holes from the bottom, using aluminium plumber's tape. It's super sticky so it seals well, and it won't be damaged by the resin either. You might need these seals to hold for a few days, depending on the weather. Make sure the wood is level, otherwise you'll end up with wonky resin bits. Now it's time to mix the resin. Give it a good mixing and then add your pigment. If you warm i...

I was asked about doing a tutorial on soldering. So here it is. Soldering is much easier than it looks - with a bit of practice you can be making bezels, joining bits of wire and much more. Main things to remember are clean joins and to heat the piece not the solder. Spending time getting everything nice and clean and properly in place before you get the blowtorch out is important. Notice how much time, even speeded up, I spend aligning the piece of silver in this video. I've heard the word "light-tight" used to check a joint is ready for soldering - if you can see air between the two bits of metal, your joint isn't lined up correctly. Some people say solder won't fill gaps, but it will. That's not an excuse to not having your joints line up though! This ring was only polished to about 800 grit (the  radial polishing discs  you see towards the end are awesome!) so it's still a little satin-y to look at. There's nothing to stop you polishing it al...

Wooden rings benefit from a good tough, protective coating both for visual appeal and to keep them safe from scratches and knocks. CA (superglue) is perfect for this. It dries very hard, very tough and super glossy. The process for finishing a ring is pretty easy. It's as simple as building a few layers on the ring, sanding flat and then polishing to a shine. The ring featured below only took ten minutes from start to finish, which is helped by using an accelerator spray on the CA, but even without that you can do the whole job in well under an hour. Before starting, the ring has been sanded to 1500 grit, dusted and cleaned with white spirit, then mounted on my turning jig (OK, OK, it's a power drill clamped to my bench - but it works!). This process can be used for metal rings too - a coat of CA will protect a gilded finish, or stop copper from tarnishing. For a change, I've made a video of the process rather than photos. Here we go, apologies in advance for dodgy ed...

As requested by someone on Reddit's wonderful /r/crafts subreddit, a short tutorial on gilding. Gilding is not as hard as you might expect, and with a simple beginner's kit , you can get going right away. I suggest purchasing an imitation leaf kit to start with, as messing up gilding aluminium is an awful lot cheaper than messing up with 24k gold leaf! OK, so here are a pair of rings waiting to be gilded. They were made as per the tutorial on making metal rings I did last week. One silver, one copper. One bright and mirror polished, one satin finish. They need to be clean, so no finishing polish or wax just yet. I'm going to use two different gilds on these, in two different styles - but your options are limited only by your skills with a brush and your imagination. Gilding, being an ancient art, has lots of lovely old language associated with it. Gilders don't use glue, they use size. It's basically just glue. I like to use a nice fine lining...