Seriously, I have had the urge to start working with sterling silver again. I still love copper, but wouldn't it be fun to combine the two metals or make a bunch of sterling silver earrings for myself! Yes!
If you watched the shot plate video demonstration, you'll see you need to gather your silver scraps and melt them into perfect little balls. So much fun. BTW, she demonstrates the shot plate at the end of the video.
So the first thing I did was get out my new charcoal block and made some little piles of silver scrap.
Magically the heat of the torch formed the silver into balls.
These were so small that I made more with bigger piles of scrap.
Then a third batch .....
They were finally getting to be the right size for the larger depressions on the shot plates. So I tried a couple. First putting the round side of the ball into the depression and hammering the top flat.
It's harder than it looks. I need way more practice with the larger ones. The third piles of silver were a bit too large, so I'll try again tomorrow .. in the cool of the morning. But I managed to get a few done, so I have a few decorated balls and a few plain ones. The nice thing is, they all have a flat bottom which makes it easier to solder them to your projects.
