I've got a very special project to show you today, one that I was rather nervous about but thankfully turned out very well!
My Mum has recently been dropping hints about wanting a pair of gold earrings - the type of hints that were accompanied by a little plastic bag with parts of a couple of broken gold earrings and a few other scraps as well! As it was her birthday on 15th February I decided that that was the time for gold earrings. Fancy seeing how I made them? I'm afraid that the pictures aren't the prettiest as they were quick snaps of work in progress, but there are pretty pictures at the end, promise.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLWlDyFY88k3X2Z05U5MW10YPkbJ-8QlN8exfsq3YfBXPtl2pORXR4p42FUQ_bPFPAzt_TOo0_Ibys_X6BK-p4wUBoT_vSwjHsm4rOgQNPNxtWRHVn5hyhKVSg1fqPBKv9z2XwMLdCOr0/s640/gold+earrings_1.jpg)
First up was melting the scrap into a ball on my charcoal block. Doesn't look particularly pretty at this point, does it? I then realised that to make the type of earrings I had in mind I would need some more gold, so I took out of my Grandma's old jewellery box a couple of old broken earrings of hers that I'd been keeping to melt to make something special. Perfect for a new pair of earrings for Mum! A bit of weighing scrap and a bit more melting and I had two nuggets of gold of as closely the same size as possible. 3g of 9k gold is about £30 worth of gold!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCWWDLmwUK2vZU7wmYQwAkPrD3LhhmP3IJXNnEfw8L13MR8LQOfuebAhseM0YM0yBeQ-n_OLPCtGJvBJpdsFvEMkA89Q__6FxWEIZWsaoJ3qkrCPhMeJTmgoanF7rntUvHAbd_jpgUDN8/s640/gold+earrings_2.jpg)
My plan was to use the rolling mill to turn the nuggets into little pieces of sheet as oval as possible, so I hammered them first to speed things up a bit and passed them through the rolling mill lots (and lots!) of times, making sure that they were the same way round each time to stretch them out into ovals. A little bit of filing to make sure that they were the same shape and size and they would have been ready for hammering......but I decided that I wanted to make them thicker and a different shape so I melted them again, into one bigger nugget this time!
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqWEwEPD4Si6XFk_ohDdlUJqhuHQ3-bcXUJTwQIYxNGQ6EVB97mLzE2FcvDbTp1QTcxPbDFXamWSMUXckMMyT7A3VQHWt8wlPds8zUcN6aoQTHLiCf0TIAdfzZ-ERTWZnO7FMG8QAK7WA/s640/gold+earrings_3.jpg)
And, after hammering with my favourite hammer, soldering on stud fittings and polishing, this is what I ended up with (here are the pretty pictures!). I think that I was more nervous about giving Mum these earrings than I have been about any other piece of jewellery I made for her. I don't think it was because they're gold, I think it was more about where the gold came from, but I do like the idea that I made Mum a pair of earrings from gold recycled from her old jewellery and her Mum's old jewellery. Much better than old broken pieces sitting at the bottom of a jewellery box! Mum put them in as soon as she opened the box, which is always a good sign.