Delve into a world where fantasy meets innovation with my Enariel pendant. This exquisite piece combines the artistry of elvish and celtic design elements with the functionality of a 64GB USB drive, offering you both beauty and utility in one elegant package.

A creation journey

Being a huge fantasy genre fan I always have this desire to bring some of its elegancy into our world. Also I want my jewellery to be more than just a mere decoration. This is where the USB drive part comes in.

Once a spark of inspiration lands in my mind it takes me hours of sketching to get it out.

I select the most promising draft and start crafting the separate elements accordingly. The overall idea is to make this pendant in 2 parts: a main frame with a gem and a detachable USB drive.

The USB drive part

The bottom part of the pendant is essentially a basket for a USB drive with decorative frames. I chose a brand new Goodram UPI2 64GB nano USB drive. This particular model is awesome for such projects because its plastic case is not an integral part of the drive itself. After removing the plastic parts you got a clean full metal USB stick with little grip bumps on the sides.

I used 1.0mm wire for the central frame and 0.8mm wires for everything else.

The main challange here (and the excitement) is that the elements must be assembled in 3D instead of a flat piece. I solder the central frame first and two auxiliary ones on both sides right after. I figured that it is easier to solder all 3 frames at the bottom point and then attach it to the USB basket.

The main frame

I had an itching desire to create something spiky. It was probably inspired mostly by the world of Witcher and Elder Scrolls where you can often loot some cool artefacts left by ancient civilisations. Hence, the idea boils down to have two wire triangles curved inwards attached to a cage where a USB drive would come in.

Together these triangles would create a frame stiff enough to hold a detachable element firmly. I used 1mm thick silver wires for that purpose, but it turned out that 0,8mm would work just as well. So I would solder 2 out of 3 pairs of vertexes together leaving the last pair at the bottom where the USB part would be inserted.

Only at a later stage of the project I thought that a gemstone would make it all look even cooler. Luckily I had this gorgeous carnelian cab lying around for quite some time that I purchased in a small mineral shop in Poland. A bezel setting was not an option as it would ruin the airy feeling of the entire design. Thus I simply marked four points on the frame as symmetrical as possible and soldered prong wires.

One of the most important things of the entire pendant is the way its parts are holding together. The connection must be strong enough to ensure that the bottom part would not fall off easily. On the other hand it should be easy to operate. I had to get through few iterations until the mechanism was good enough. I used simple bracelet clasps firmly clicking onto the blobs soldered to the USB basket.

The result

After some extensive polishing and tumbling I set the carnelian on the prongs and bent the ends of clasps to kinda outline the bottom frame. I am happy with the end result and also I learned few things along the way so this experiment can be considered successful.

You might also wanna check the video of the Enariel pendant:

Cha-ching!

Another major evidence of success and recognition of me as an artist is that the pendant was sold!

My artistic ego is skyrocketing!

Even more so, my artwork was also bought as a birthday gift! I guess that the artistic fulfilling sensation ain’t getting better than that

If you like the stuff I create make sure to check my Etsy store SlavikLTD.

The post Enariel – fantasy USB pendant appeared first on Slavik LTD.

The old legends say that the ancient elves could memorise all their knowledge and wisdom. But over time elven culture started to decline along with their abilities. Elves could no longer rely on their memory and were forced to develop technology to help them keep the wisdom safe. This path led them to an era of digital storage drives which were fast, durable and as everything else in elven culture – astonishingly decorated.

Inspired by this fantasy sci-fi story I imagined an ancient drawing of how such device could look like and set off to a challenge to produce a really cool elven-looking USB stick.

This story really got stuck in my mind. I even purchased a tiniest Goodram USB drive. However, I struggled viciously to sketch it out on paper and at some point I decided to just start it and go with the flow.The first thing to do is to disassemble the USB stick. Surprisingly it wasn’t too easy as I assume it is not deigned to be taken apart. Google wasn’t too helpful in this case either, but I managed to get rid of plastic outer body and left with a neat bear metal USB block.

The main frame

Thankfully this model has little ledges on both sides which I will use to set it in the new frame. It is extremely important to make the setting frame right as it will hold the entire pendant together.

So I started with wrapping a 1mm wire around the USB block as tight as possible to get a good grip. I actually made it even a bit smaller to be able to fit it with higher accuracy by gradually grinding off the inside cavity.

The setting frame is basically 3 joint rectangular rings with the middle one is slightly wider than the outer ones. This is needed to get nice little grooves on both sides of the frame where the ledges will sit and hold the USB block firmly in place.

Even though I wanted to I could not make a test fitting of the setting frame as probably I would not be able to undo it. Hence I went on with the rest of the decorative frame. I used the same 1mm wire for the floral elven-like elements. I found it very handly to use a steel wire to hold pieces together while soldering.

The entire pendant is not going to be flat which makes filling in the filigree a little harder. All decorative elements must have the filigree already soldered in before the final assemble.

Soldering the setting frame to the first decorative frame finally gave me a feeling of how the entire pendant would look like. And I liked it. From that moment on it was downhill – I made another decorative frame similar to the first one and attached it to the setting frame.

The cap

Forging the cap for the elven-look USB drive was not supposed to be that complicated. I started with making a rectangular ring out of 1mm wire that fits tightly the USB block. Then I made two similar decorative frames and soldered them to the cap ring.

The difficult part came to my mind a bit late. How will this cap hold itself on the main frame? In the original plastic cap there are tiny ledges on the inside walls that are aligned with the USB port square holes. I could have gone this road before the cap was assembled, but now it was not an option.

So I decided to try another way by adding a springy clamp on both sides of the cap. These clamps should be able to click onto the setting frame and stay robust enough to hold the cap in place. The unexpected fact for me was that silver is not awfully springy and there is no wide know way to make it act that way. Luckily I know a few real goldsmith professionals who recommended me few tricks to try. Although hardening silver through heat treatment is quite complicated process, gentle hammering on the claps seemed to work just fine.

Photoshoot

Once both parts of the pendant are nicely polished and cleaned out I test those clams by taking the cap off and putting it back on few dozen times. It is truly mesmerising.

I do hope that if elves were amongst us they would be pleased by this interpretation of their technology era. Enjoy the photoshoot!

It has an extremely satisfying clicking sound – check the video 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 Silver elven USB flash drive appeared first on Slavik LTD.

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

The post Elvish pendant with amethyst appeared first on Slavik LTD.