Well, not exactly magic...but there are a few processes to go through to create a piece of jewellery and thought I'd share some photos and explain how I make something like this little pendant.
One of the first rules of making jewellery with precious metal (or even base metals like copper and brass) is never throw anything away. Tiny bits of wire that get snipped off - keep 'em. Horrible soldering mistakes - keep 'em. Mangled experiments? Keep 'em! All jewellers have a scrap pot and we can either melt down what's in it and use a rolling mill to roll out new pieces of wire or sheet, or if you're like me and don't have a rolling mill then you have to get creative with how you can use up those discarded pieces of silver.
These aren't the most glamorous of photos and they were taken very quickly during the process so please forgive the quality. What you can see here is a little pile of bits and pieces of silver. I heat them with my torch until they melt and form a ball.
After letting the newly formed little ball of silver cool down we're left with this unappealing blob of blackened silver.
No photos of this stage but next it has to go into what's called pickle to clean off the black oxides. I used to literally use a pickle mix of vinegar and salt but the kids would complain about the smell so I now use citric acid. After a few minutes in the warm pickle solution the black is gone. Now to get it into shape for use as a little pendant. As I previously mentioned I don't have a rolling mill so I have to use a hammer and brute force.
After a bit of trial and error I've discovered that that little piece of silver is much less likely to fly off and be lost forever if I place it between two steel bench blocks and whack the top one with the biggest hammer I have. Around five or six good hard whacks will flatten this piece enough to make it useable. If I want it to be thinner then I'd have to anneal it; reheat it and repickle it to make the silver malleable enough to move it again with the force of the hammer. But for this type of pendant I find that those five or 6 whacks take it to around 3 or 4mm thick and that's great for flush setting where you burr into the metal to create a seat for a little faceted stone.
Using liquid flux, a tiny piece of solder, a tiny jump ring and my torch I then need to solder the little jump ring to the top of the pendant and once that's done it goes back into the pickle to clean it up.
As the surface of the pendant is a bit pitted from all of the stress it's been under the next job is sanding both surfaces until they're smooth. This is done by hand with a sanding stick, the piece is rubed back and forth along the stick, changing the orientation every so often, to get rid of all of this little pits and dimples. At this stage I'll make sure it's almost as polished as I want it to be - although with this piece I wanted it to have a satin finish so it wasn't too important to think about a highly polished surface.
Stone setting next. Actually, that's not true - the next stage really "should" be soldering on the jump ring that will allow the piece to be worn on a silver chain but I like to live dangerously and leave that till last, after the stone has been set. It's a great way of making sure I practice good heat control and because of the way I set stones into these tiny pieces that extra jump ring will get in the way.
Using a small block of wood (from an old Jenga set I think) in my vise I use superglue to attach the pendant to the wood. Do you see now how that extra jump ring would be in the way? It would mean the silver wouldn't sit flat on the wood and adhere. Yes, I "could" stick it down right at the top edge of the wood with the jump ring hanging over the edge but that's not how I do it...
I'm going to set a gorgeous soft green 2mm sapphire in this pendant, so first of all I have to place a divot in the metal so my burr doesn't skid off. I use a small ball burr to create a hole for the stone to go into, and then use a 1.8mm setting burr to create a little seat or ledge for the stone to sit on. Once the seat has been cut (and trust me, it takes a while - you have to get the seat cut deeply enough for the faceted stone to go in, but not so deep that the next part of the setting process works) and the stone clicks into place it has to be firmly set in place using something called a needle burnisher that gets run around the circumference of the stone, pushing down a tiny lip of silver over the girdle of the stone, trapping it in place.
Here's a video of the process being done on a different item, this was a 1.5mm stone going into a slim ring. And please excuse my shaky hands, I was actually quite nervous about filming this!
And there you have it, the finished item, jump ring soldered into place ready for a chain so it can be worn.
This was quite a simple piece to make, so hopefully you can appreciate that other larger or decorative pieces have more processes that go into them. I'll try and remember to take more process photos but quite often I'm so focused on what I'm doing that I forget.
At the time of writing this piece is still available to buy so if you can't live without it now you've seen how it was created, pop over to the shop and make it yours.