Elvish pendant with amethyst

This pendant is created for a fellow LOTR fan, inspired by this elvish earrings set I made earlier. The requirement was very much straightforward – create a pendant that looks like one of those earrings, but with a different stone.

I sketched out quite a few options around the amethyst cabochon with bull’s eye effect. Unfortunately, there was no way to make a cast for it out of the crown strip I have at hand, hence classic prongs will hold the stone.

The most important and should I say the most satisfying part of making an elvish jewellery is creating its central frame or spine. It usually is a pair of wires intertwining in different ways and shapes. In my case it is a basically 4 leaves shaped frame soldered at the joints.

Then comes the frame for a stone where I’ll put a few prongs to hold it in place in a final phase. It is made with the same wire as the spine so it looks like its natural extension.

The last pieces of frames are the “elven ears” – they shift the visual focus a bit to the top to make the lower part of the spine look more delicate and the entire piece starts to look wonderful. The challenge here is that I’ve got two joints with 8 wires in each so I’d have to use medium-hard solder to make sure the pendant is stiff enough to hold together.

In this design I decided to install 6 prongs for the cabochon, even though 4 would be enough to firmly hold the stone in the frame. Once the prongs are in place, I put the filigree filament inside some of the frames to get a mysterious gipure effect.

Soldering the metal parts is completed so it is time to take an acid bath to get rid of the impurities and flux residue. After that a series of sanding off the flaws with fine grain brushes and thorough polishing afterwards.

And here comes the stone. Mesmerising amethyst cabochon with a bull’s eye effect. First I bend the prongs a bit to let the stone sit tight in its place, even a bit of minor grinding is usually required to position it accurately. Once I’m happy with the stone positioning the prongs should be bent with extreme precaution – this is the step I used to have a lot of failures breaking the prongs, misplacing the stone and sometimes tossing the whole piece to trash and starting over.

This time I broke only one prong with no further damages and I was able to fix it relatively quickly. Although the acid bath and polishing procedures must have been completed again. I also decided to make a special shackle with the filigree in it to match the design of the whole pendant and voila – I am quite proud of the end result! Enjoy the video 🙂

Unfortunately, this item is not available for purchase. If you dream about something similar, please check my Etsy store or contact me through the form or on Instagram and let’s see what I can do 🙂