Sole

Every silver shoe starts with a sole. Same as previously (like in High Heel Filigree Sandal with Carnelian Stone and Butterfly or Strappy high heeled pendant with garnet cabochon) I cut it out of a 1mm silver sheet. Interestingly enough I couldn’t find any template for a high heel sole so each time I draw it by hand. It would be an issue to craft a specific size shoe, thus it’s a good thing no one will wear those on their feet.

Once the first sole is sawed and rough edges are filed away I use it to make a pair. I draw an outline of the first sole on the sheet to saw a second one. This way it is easier to make pair of soles look very much alike.

Having both soles cut and polished it is a perfect moment to stamp my brand on them. Mainly because they are still flat. Once you bend them into a shoe shape the stamping task becomes hell of a lot more complicated. Ah, recently I got a new punch with a tiny 925 marking and I love how it presents itself right under the SL stamps.

Next step is to bend the sole into the shoe shape. It can be a bit difficult because you want your shoes to have sexy curves. I mostly do the bending by hand with a little help of nylon pliers not to damage the surface too much.

Heel

Once I’m happy with the soles shape it is time for the most tricky part of the shoe – the high heel itself. The heel is a complex pin with a flat angled surface on one end.

To produce the heel I first heat up and melt one end of a 1mm wire to form a bubble. Then I cut this bubble to fit the angle of the sole and solder it to a little D-shaped 1mm plate. It does look really ugly until it burred, filed and polished to its proper shape.

When the heel starts to look okay-ish I solder it to the sole to form a “slipper” which is a base for the future shoe. Based on previous experience I now use a longer piece of wire so I can adjust and equalise the heel hight for both shoes. Having both slippers looking alike is a huge successful milestone in this project.

Back heel holder

The leading design idea for this particular pair is to have few shoe straps to hold the stones. Pretty much like these gorgeous Cassandra high heel sandals from Saint Laurent. Not being too good at following the sketches I decided to model it out. I sculpted a little leg out of a candle wax and attached it to a slipper.

First decoration (and also structurally crucial) element of the shoe decoration is the back heel holder. I use paper stickies to cut out the shape for the heel holders and stick them onto the wax leg. Based on the paper template I saw them out of 0.8mm silver plate and anneal it to prepare for hammering.

Straps

Back heel holder also has rather complex geometry. I tried before to produce only with and tools and let me tell you – it is not a good idea. I am genuinely happy that I spent profit from selling my High Heel Filigree Sandal with Carnelian Stone and Butterfly on this micro dapping set! It is a perfect tool to form silver into curvy shapes and I was super excited to use it in this project.

With the heel holders soldered to the slippers it finally started to look like a proper pair of heels. Now it is time to add some straps!

Again the sticky notes came in very handy for modelling straps for my sandal. I just cut out thin stripes of paper and put them onto the wax leg to see how it would look. It also gave me an idea about where the stone saddle will sit and what are the attachment points.

Based on the paper templates I cut my 0.6×1.4mm flat wire into pieces and solder them one by one to each slipper. Once all the straps were in place I filed the attachment points for the stone saddles and soldered them right in. After all the soldering I left both shoes in the acid bath for some time for cleaning. It would be great to put them into the tumbler for a nice polishing, but I ain’t got one unfortunately. But my Dremel Micro with metal brushes and silicone discs also managed to do a good job. The result was actually better than I expected and I got so excited I almost started to set the sones!

Shackles

Happily though I managed to calm myself down and noticed that an important element is still missing – a shackle to connect an earring with a hook.

It would still be possible to do after the stones are set, but I prefer not to heat up the stones. This is risky as not all stones take heating positively. Some might change colour or even crack, hence it is a good habit to leave the stone setting as the very last step in making a jewellery masterpiece.

I took two tiny bits of my flat wire and bent them into micro jump rings. As this should be the very last soldering activity I used the super soft solder to preserve already existing solder joints. Also I clamp a shoe heel in a cross tweezer to dissipate the excessive heat while soldering the shackles. With shackles attached I went through another cycle of acid bathing and manual polishing to get ready for stone setting.

Stone setting

This is my first project I specifically purchased stones for. There is a local shop selling all kinds of precious and semi-precious stones, This is where I found these gorgeous garnet marquise stones and I knew exactly where to put them. Basically I did the entire shoe design around these marvellous garnets.

I choose to use bezel setting technique for this project as I find it the most neat and tidy way of exposing a beautiful stone. Prongs can sometime steal away some thunder away from the stone and I definitely didn’t want it here. Given that the high heel sandal is not the easiest shape to set the stone into I needed a smart way to firmly hold it in a vice. Most jewellers advise to use some sort of jewellery putty or sealing wax, but I can tell you that the polymorph plastics works great as well. You just melt it in a hot water, form it around your piece and let it cool down. Once hardened it is surprisingly strong and you can safely clamp it in a vice for bezel setting. After I finished setting stones into their saddles I gave the earrings another round of fine polishing. And let me tell you honestly – they look truly remarkable!

Exhibition

I hope you enjoyed following the manufacturing process and now it is time to check out the final result. This time I tried to spice things up a little and produce some artisan styled photos (at least in my mind they are). Thus I invite you to have a glimpse though the pictures below and enjoy the show!

This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

The post High heel strappy sandals silver earrings appeared first on Slavik LTD.

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Making soles

Based on the experience I gained so far it seems obvious that any shoe making starts from the sole. So I just borrowed my wife’s real life sandals and outlined approximately the shape of the sole on a post-it note. This convenient as the post-it then sticks well to silver during the next step.

As a sort of an optimisation freak I had an idea of sawing 2 soles simultaneously. Spoiler alert – don’t try this approach and stick to the normal cutting by a jeweller saw. Besides, it is also a lot of fun!

I started to kinda like the sawing process. Once you get your hand on it it is impressive how precise the cut can be. This is nothing like sawing the wood – you can trust my word on that.

Once both blanks are cut to the shape they gotta be filed to fit each other. This is where my optimisation passion pays off – I clamped both soles together and grind them to the final shape.

I figured that the process is getting easier when the blanks are equally levelled. A tiny anvil and a bit of hammering do the flattening very well.

Once I was happy with the shape of my soles I filed down all the edge on one side. This trick gave a nice nifty touch to the soles, which made a huge difference to the overall sandals design.

It was definitely a good idea to flatten the soles once again and polish them from both sides. Because the next step was the bending. Once bent it would take hell lot more time to get the same shiny effect on the soles surface.

Mounting heels

The hardest part of the tiny shoe making is to produce a good looking and fine fitting heel. It took me several attempts and lot of hours trying to get it right without metal casting experience as well as equipment.

In my first iteration I tried a technique used for making pins. A piece of wire hangs a bit above the heating brick and flame heat up its lower end. Wire melts on one side forming a droplet which should be easy to file down to a heel shape. The problem I discovered was that it makes a weak spot where wire and a droplet are joined. Even though I was being careful it broke both times I tried to shape it with a file.

Until I am ready for real silver casting, there is another way to make a spike heel. I used it before and it seemed to work fine, even though it is far from perfect. The idea is extremely simple – I carved out a rough heel shaped hole in my coal heating brick and melt silver scraps right on top of it. As a result I got a strong solid piece, but it required a lot of afterwork to make it look nice.

A friend of mine, an experienced dental specialist, offered to help me out with metal casting. It seems like a great next challenge in my jewellery adventure, but I decided to complete this project in the old school fully manual way. And to be honest I think it went quite well – I was even offered to sell one of those blank slippers as a pendant.

Decorating the slippers

The offer turned out to be not too serious after all, so I started to prepare myself for the next phase. Even though the high heeled slippers look surprisingly good I did have in mind to decorate them. And this time I was determined to set some stones.

I’ve got a couple of tiny cute amethyst marquises in my mineral collection, which are perfect for the occasion. Small and semi transparent they would look lovely on the silver sandals. Having a hard time trying to sketch out a design I decided to go with a flow and try ideas along the way.

To boost my imagination I even carved a tiny leg out of a polymer clay (first time I ever tried it). Although it looked a little creepy it did help me to figure out the overall pattern I was after. I imagined that the shoe will have a toe strap, an ankle strap and an amethyst set between them. To make sure it will all work I needed a reference point, hence I started with a setting frame for the stone.

There was nothing supernatural – just a loop made out of a 1.2mm strip and some filigree to keep the stone from the bottom. During the fitting it al on the tiny fake leg I figured that the setting frame is a tad short and it will skew all the straps. Naturally I needed to add something around as an extension. My eye got caught by a piece of twisted silver wire scrapped from a previous project. Mental note to myself: spirals can consume a lot of solder unless you fit them properly to the frame.

It is interesting that when my excitement goes a tiny bit over the top something happens. I was grinding the inside of the setting frame to make sure the amethyst will sit there comfortably and put it in its saddle on and off like hundred times. And all of a sudden there was a sound no jeweller ever wants to hear – crack. Damn. Snap, back to reality (cheers, Eminem). This was pure luck that I had another amethyst just like the broken one. However, the setting frame was no good for it and I had to start over.

For those who know me close enough it won’t be a surprise that I adore tiny micro things. So here was my chance to produce one of those – a tiny clasp for the ankle strap. I have done it once in a previous project and I must proudly confess that I’m getting better at this. Oh, come on you gotta admit – this is cool! And freaking cute!

Another little trick I figured during the final assembly of all elements. The setting frame for my amethyst marquise needed to be equipped with prong to hold the stone tight. Since the whole idea of these earrings is to be fragile and delicate I made the prongs out of the thinest wire I had in stock. If I’d cut the prongs prior to soldering it would have been quite tricky to get them attached properly. Hence, the hack is to bend a longer chunk of wire in a shaсkle and solder it as a whole. This way heat from the torch dissipates evenly and solder doesn’t flow all over the place.

Enjoy the show

I was kinda worried that it would be a challenge to make a second earring looking similar to the first one. It turned out to be somewhat true as I fully completed one earring first. Only after I was happy with the result I started the second shoe. But the fact that I didn’t have an initial design sketch came in handy as I just used the first earring as a guide for another one.

In any case I wish you to enjoy the photoshoot below and I hope it’ll give you an inspiration to pursue your own passion. Have fun!

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This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

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The post Alemanas – High Heeled Amethyst Earrings appeared first on Slavik LTD.

For a long time I was reluctant to give it a try as I constantly doubt my craftsmanship skills. And making a decent looking fantasy jewellery piece is a challenge, especially for a self taught silversmith with tons of self-confidence issues.

Nevertheless challenge has already been accepted, especially considering a set of marvellous jade cabochons I got on one of the stones and minerals happenings. After dozens of different designs sketched out I was a bit frustrated that I’ll get to a same trap of a too many choices. Hence, pushing myself forward one of the sketched was semi-randomly selected as a starting point – I knew that changes are inevitable anyway.

Wire bending has started with the lower part of the frame, the rough plan was to created 3 frames and connect them all together in the end. With the lower frame I decided to try modular approach, which turned out to be a mistake in terms of complexity of operations and time spent. However, the result was better than I expected so all the efforts payed off.

To keep up with the second piece (this is an earrings set after all), natural next step would be to make the same lower frame. And this time lesson is learnt: instead of modular clunky approach I bent two curves and filed down the points where curves are going to be connected. This way wires fit way better and soldering was done in a single round.

After that comes wirework for the top part, which was fairly easy mostly because there is not much intertwining going on. I started with a straight M-shaped frame and curved it to fit the sketch. Then it was just a matter of soldering together top and bottom parts of the main frame, while the stone cast I left for the final stage.

Curved twisted wires formed several small closed loops, which I immediately felt like filling in with the filigree wire. It always gives me an odd satisfying feeling and magical tough to almost any jewellery piece.

Filigree magic was done and for the first time I tried to marry the main frame and the stone cast. By the way, the stone cast was made long before I started this project when I purchased a sample of a prefabricated wire strip and was keen on trying to do something with it. The problem with such strip is that you cannot just produce a cast of any size and expect its pattern to fit it.

Looking at all the piece together there was a feeling that something is missing. So as anticipated at the beginning some design changes were going in. I realised that cross bars in the top frame (as designed initially) would look a bit clunky, thus it was only natural to add some more intertwined wires with a spiral ends at the tip. Quick trial with a piece of wire convinced me that it looks great and the final soldering began.

Few hours of soldering and pickling in the acid and I got to enjoy a nice stiff earring frame, still with imperfections here and there. Which means the beginning of one of the most satisfying chapter of the whole production process – polishing. For this stage I’ve got myself a fancy Dremel Micro engraver and I have never been happier with such tool.

It takes few hours to properly sand off all the excessive solder and smooth out connection points to get a result I seek. Then I use few different metal wire brushes to make silver shine. So far I didn’t have a chance to get my hands on a proper polishing paste and a right buff, but I find that a final shiny touch you can also get by using a nail polishing buff.

Now, when all parts are nicely polished and properly cleaned it is time to set our cabochons. With the crown cast it doesn’t take a genius skillset to set the stones as long as the cast fits correctly. For this operation I don’t even have to use any patty to hold my pieces firmly to the table – fingers do the job all right. For bending the crown tips I prefer to use a wooden stick, there is no need for chisel here.

Earring hooks I bought specifically for this project turned out to be a bit too massive and I clearly needed something more lightweight for these fragile looking earrings. Gladly I spared a pair of a slick curvy earring hooks from one my first projects which fit perfectly into the elvish looking jewellery.

This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

The post Elvish jade earrings appeared first on Slavik LTD.

Apart from the job itself there was another type of inspiration as well. There was a very good colleague leaving our team and relocating abroad and we couldn’t decide what goodbye gift from our team to choose.

Once there were no sensible options left and little time to the deadline I took the liberty to suggest something that will definitely remind her about us – aircraft shaped earrings. The idea was taken unanimously and I commenced my magic the very same evening.

Funny thing was when I tasked my team to ensure that she has pierced ears for the earrings I’m already started doing. For a few days I was watching everyone trying to secretly check up her ears and is there any jewellery in them.

The production has started as usually with bending the silver wires. First was the plane body, looked like an overstretched droplet, and from my little experience I cautiously filed down connection points where wings and empennage will be attached.

Soldering went well, although it took me a while to get all details right. After the aircraft took its proper shape it was a filigree show time. Regular round and oval frames are relatively easy for filigree technique, but fill in the odd shapes with twisted wire is a challenge.

When the first earring is completed the hard part comes – make the second earring that looks like the first one. Steps are very much the same with few little improvements I picked along the way during the first stage of production.

That’s why making an earrings set is much more difficult comparing to a single piece jewellery such as a pendant or a ring.

Frame is shaped, soldered at the tip and joints are filed. Wings and empennage are fit and ready to be merged together.

Filigree magic is completed and both earring are gently polished to make them look shiny and presentable.

A little test performed by my lovely wife – all seems good!

I was about to pack the earring into a cute gift box for an even greater wow-efect, results of the teams secret mission came along – our colleague has not been noticed even once wearing any earrings, even though it seems she has her ears pierced. “Good timing”, popped in my head and proud of myself being prepared I quickly made a little adjustment and plan B was in its full glory: aircraft earrings set is now officially an aircraft pendant!

The story has a bittersweet ending though. Our dear colleague seemed to really liked the gift, but she quit the job and moved out anyway. We all wish her all the best in the new place!

After all that urgent wire banding and soldering at night time I was considering turn the other earring into a pendant as well. But still being on a tide of inspiration I produced another aircraft trying to match the first one to have a cute set of filigree earrings.

This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

The post Aircraft filigree pendant appeared first on Slavik LTD.

I found this pair of mesmerising rectangular nephrite stones in a small mineral shop downtown. It took me a while to figure out what to do with those to make them look even better.

Apparently for such shape of stone a ring was not my first option, so I asked my wife to sketch out some ideas for the earrings. Her fascination with plants immediately kicked in and a simple rectangular cast with two leaves in front appeared.

It was a love from the first draft! With no hesitation I dived into bending wires and soldering them into the shape.

Polishing process was pretty straightforward even though there were few surprises during the soldering. While attaching a back clip the main frame got overheated and cracked right where the jumpring was attached.

After few flaws were fixed and buffed out I finally got to enjoy the completed result. A pair of somewhat minimalistic floral themed rectangular earrings are ready to prettify someone’s pair of ears!

This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

The post Rectangular floral earrings appeared first on Slavik LTD.

This is pretty much what happened to me some time ago. I was sitting around without any desire to create or design anything. It took a while until I realised that the inspiration and motivation are forces coming from within. Once you start looking inside yourself – you just have to keep your mind open and ideas will begin to pop out. Always have your sketchbook close by.

Also getting handy in the 3D modelling tool might be incredibly helpful for boosting your inspiration and self-confidence.

My vision of the idea drew itself as light bulb (yes, a bit of a cliche). So the quick sketch was made and soon enough the silver wires started to be cut and shaped into forms.

When wires are shaped into forms it is time to ignite the flame and get them soldered. The first step is to solder the main frame of my bulb.

Then comes the inside suport frame to hold the stone bead in place, which will represent the tungsten filament.

Frames are done, now it’s time to add the screw.

When all parts are soldered together they go into the pickle and then being polished. All nice and shiny bulb frame is ready to set a piece of jasper tubular bead I got from a local mineral shop.

Here they are – a pair of an Idea Bulbs earring are waiting for their owner.

Enjoy a nice little photoshoot below!

This piece is still available for purchase. If you are interested please visit my Etsy Store or send me a DM in my Instagram to talk business

The post Bulb earrings appeared first on Slavik LTD.