As you may remember I made this link.

Which was all well and good except that the chain I made with it costs 5 billion dollars as it was so time consuming to make the ends smooth enough so that they wouldn’t catch on your clothes. (This bracelet is still for sale btw if anyone has the 5 billion in cash).

So, just in case people couldn’t afford the 5 billion, I made a revised version of the link,

this time with balled up ends.

This one was, by far, faster to make but I’m not sure I prefer it to the first. However, I haven’t made a whole chain out of the link yet so I might like it more then.

See that little divot in the end of the ball?

Don’t laugh, but, I’ve just found out if you use .999 fine silver wire instead of sterling silver the balls come out perfectly. I found the wire to be a lot softer to work with, however, and it has a tendency to kink and bend and basically take on its own shape until you harden it by hammering or tumbling. Is the fighting with it worth it for the perfect ball and the non tarnished finish, I ask myself?

Myself has yet to make a decision on that count.

And, as we’re talking about tumbling …

When I first bought my tumbler a few years or six back I bought the wrong shot and it all went rusty after the first time I used it. But, even though I moaned and grumbled and wondered if I would ever use the thing anyway, I finally bought the correct, stainless steel, shot. Why do they even sell the rusty kind I want to know? When I tried it out a second time I was really put off by how long the thing had to run for it to even begin to shine the silver. I actually ran it for a good couple of hours and when I finally got really fed up with it and opened it up to take a look, the silver was still the same dirty old stuff I’d put in there. And I wont even mention the noise the thing makes, the constant droning, on and on and on, except that it’s really annoying. I even thought about putting it outside to do its thing but it’s that irritating the neighbours might complain.

Fast forward to now when I decided to give the thing another go. It bums me out that other people use tumblers and yet I can’t seem to get the hang of it and so the darn thing has been lurking in the background like a sore tooth, niggling away, and, I swear, just mocking me. So, I braced myself for the noise and disappointment, put some cleaning stuff in there along with the shot and water, and, what do you know, the whole thing leaks. The rubber seal has obviously sat too long in the cupboard. I got out an old empty glaze tub and improvised with that, just to prove to myself that this was not going to faze me, (I’d show it!), but, again, after hours and hours, the silver was still unchanged. I read on a forum somewhere that some people leave the thing running overnight. I just can’t see me doing that. And the bottom line – I don’t even like shiny silver. Must have forgotten that little detail when I bought the darn thing.

I am determined that this piece of no good equipment is going to work for me, however, and so today I am going to give it one last shot. This time to harden my silver, not to clean it, as for the life of me I don’t know if the thing would know how to clean silver if it had to save the world.

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Here are my newest chain bracelets.

And a tiger eye and silver necklace.

In your face tumbler thing.

🙂

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