Wedding tiara creation process - Continued Posted on 17 Jul 14:30

After getting things ready for making jewelry it's helpful to keep your workflow simple. And remember to take pictures after each step since you only have one chance to immortalize these steps now. ( I forgot to take pictures of the actual soldering and hammering process)

• Cut and shape the part for the jewelry piece
• Fit the parts together before soldering
• Make necessary modifications to the parts
• Solder smaller parts together to for medium sized parts
• You can do the decided finish to the medium parts at this point (so you don't have to try to finish the whole huge final piece)
• Do needed modifications / fixing before soldering the medium sized parts together
• Come up with creative ways to keep the medium parts together for soldering
• Dry fit gemstones
• Make final modifications to the shape before cleaning and polishing

Creating all the pieces - The great puzzle maker

So I began making my process by cutting and fitting the parts together

Then I proceeded to make the necessary modifications to the small parts, set them ready for soldering

After that I added the solder (paste this time) carefully so the parts wouldn't move at all.

And finally I soldered the small parts together: Slowly heating the parts so the solder didn't dry too fast (fast drying leads to violent reaction that easily moves the parts away from each other). As you can see the final product doesn't have any gaps and is close enough to the original shape I set the parts to.

 Refining the pieces - The hammer time

I continued to take the assemble medium parts to a flat anvil

and used the hammers to create the forged finish.

Joining the parts - A beautiful butterfly

Next was the joining of the medium parts to a ready front piece (not yet finished full tiara). This part was fairly easy since I could just lay all the medium parts flat and solder them together and then shape the front piece to its correct shape against a ball anvil.

Then I proceeded to join the medium parts of the sides to the front piece. (Again I forgot to take a picture, this time of the large scaffold I built to hold the parts together) At this point I left the back open because we had discussed the option of making a lock for the back and so it could be tested on my customers head for a perfect fit. And of course I test fitted the green agate gemstone on the socket I made for it and fixed any loose prongs.

Test fitting - Does it even fit

After much work she finally got to try the tiara on. She quite liked it except we had to make some minor changes to the large curves near her eyes (I made them a quite bit smaller after the fitting). Here are the test fitting results before the last soldering.

Last heat - Heated decision

The last big design decision I made was to close the back permanently instead of making a lock. This decision I made to create more stable creation that fit her head tightly. (Long slender sides of the tiara don't provide a lot of stability when they are allowed to move even a small distance)

Here is the front view of the ready soldered tiara.

Then a diagonal view of the ready soldered tiara.

And finally a side view of the ready soldered tiara.

Next to come - Finishing the creation process (Cleaning and polishing)

On my next blog I will write about the finishing of the jewelry creation process: Polishing and how to get (or at least try to get) good pictures of the finalized product.