Close up of HOPE Toggle Clasp constructed with cold connections by Mary Harding
Love My Art Jewelry has been doing a series of Jewelry Boot Camps. The idea is to promote and teach skills for making handmade jewelry with handmade components: an idea I fully support. The current Boot Camp is called Hold Your Fire which is about learning how to put metal together without using a torch. Instead of soldering two pieces of metal together, we learned alternatives that do not require a torch, such as screw rivets, tube rivets, metal eyelets, escutcheon pins, and nail head rivets. For my project, I used 1/16 inch short and medium brass eyelets that I purchased from Objects and Elements. They are a bit tricky to use without splitting them, so it is a good idea to used the rounded side on the front of your piece. I used my center punch and a very light tap with my chasing hammer on the punch and then used the ball head of my hammer to gently tap around the edges until they curved and formed a tight bond with the metal.
The toggle bar is also designed with brass eyelets and one of them has a balled head end pin threaded through it and wired wrapped into a loop on the underside. I like this way of making the loop since it doesn't allow any escape route for the stringing material.
Close up of wrapped wire loop made through the tube of the brass eyelet. You can also see what an eyelet should not look like when it gets split by heavy hammering,.
You can see what others made by following this LINK and scrolling down to the inlinkz list of participants. I look forward to the next Boot Camp on Love My Art Jewelry. Thank you to all of you who work so hard to provide us with your wonderful ideas and techniques.
