Well so much for my “weekly journal”!\u00a0 I seem to write nothing for months and then write loads of posts all in one go!\u00a0 It’s like buses, you wait for ages (for the buses, not my posts), then they all come at once. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
My husband and I took our daughter Chloe (almost 17) to a jewellery trade fair a few weeks ago.\u00a0 She’s since decided that she wants to leave college and get a job in the jewellery industry, starting with retail.\u00a0 Well, actually I told her that if she wants to eventually work with me (in my “business” that isn’t even paying me at the moment, never mind my daughter), then she needs to prove herself serious by getting a job in the industry first and learning the ropes, while I teach her how to make jewellery in her spare time.\u00a0 She walked round the trade fair with a grin on her face like a Cheshire cat!\u00a0 She was so happy and she has hated her time at college so I’m happy for her to follow something that obviously gave her such pleasure.\u00a0 It was a light bulb moment for her.\u00a0 My other daughter, Melissa, who was planning to go to art school to learn jewellery making has sadly lost interest, but that’s okay too – I don’t do putting pressure on the kids – it’s their life.\u00a0 Chloe has already had her first interview, following her spending a whole day writing her CV and a covering letter (with my guidance) and dropping them off to all the jewellers in our town and the neighbouring town.\u00a0 She’s also now a member of Orchid so she’s definitely proving herself to be serious about this.<\/p>\n
She’s been on half term holiday from college this week and so we’ve been in my workshop teaching Chloe some basics.\u00a0 I dug some scrap pieces of silver sheet out of the sweeps drawer and had her flux and solder them.\u00a0 Each time something went wrong, we discussed it so that she understood why it went wrong and then it was a big achievement when it went right.\u00a0 She louped her results each time, sometimes going back again, refluxing and resoldering where there was a gap in a seam.\u00a0 She soldered some bits together using a solder pick and others by placing pallions of solder.\u00a0 She really got the hang of it\u00a0 thoroughly enjoyed it!\u00a0 I started her off with easy solder and then she went onto using hard solder.\u00a0 Once we were happy that she was confident with all the steps, Chloe marked out and cut a bezel from sterling sheet.\u00a0 She then bent it round and soldered it beautifully with hard solder, pickled it and rounded it up and stretched it on a bezel mandrel to fit a peridot stone which she had picked out.\u00a0 It fits the stone beautifully.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow, I will talk her through soldering in the bearing for the stone to sit on, before getting her to cut the seat, file and sand it smooth.\u00a0 We’ll post a picture of the finished article when it’s done.\u00a0 I’m extremely proud of her commitment so far and think I may have lost my bench!<\/p>\n
Helen Hill<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well so much for my “weekly journal”!\u00a0 I seem to write nothing for months and then write loads of posts all in one go!\u00a0 It’s like buses, you wait for ages (for the buses, not my posts), then they all come at once. \ud83d\ude09 My husband and I took our daughter Chloe (almost 17) to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/userblogs.ganoksin.com\/helensgems\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}