Recently in Jewelry I, we’ve been working on a small sculpture involving different metals soldered together. For my project, I decided to make a rose with a stem. Unfortunately the piece is not finished but the petals of the rose and the stem are complete. Both of these pieces are made out of copper and the rest I plan to make out of nickel. The other pieces to the rose that will be made out of nickel are the leaf-like part that is at the base of the rose and a leaf on the stem. I am hoping that the contrast between the copper and silver color of the nickel will work well.

The petals, which are copper, were probably the hardest part of this project so far. I did not cut each petal out individually but made it so that they were connected like a ribbon at the bottom. After the rows of petals were cut out I soldered it to a piece of metal that was wrapped like a scroll. This made a base to from and made it easier to wrap the rest of the ribbon petals around each other. Then, I used needle nose pliers to give each petal a realistic look of a rose that is in bloom.

The stem was probably the easiest part of the project. My teacher had found copper wire that was going to be thrown out and suggest I use it so that it didn’t go to waste. It was really good quality it just need to be hammered out into a straight line. After it was hammered out, I cut two long equal pieces which my teacher then twisted together for me with a power drill. The wire is extremely sturdy now and I really like the design of the copper wire twisted together. This is the progress I have made so far and hopefully I will have this project done be next week to write about.