It's finished!!!!!
The egg cup that my husband challenged me to make for his birthday/Christmas is complete! I don't normally take THIS long to finish a piece but with working on shows and commission pieces, I'm afraid this had to be worked on in my "spare" (!) time.
I really enjoyed this process, learning new techniques that I can transfer to my jewellery and seeing how much work goes into a piece like this. If we think back to a time, many many moons ago, where pretty much everything was made by hand, those silversmiths have my utmost respect.
Here are the photos from start......
A disc of fine silver being hollowed by numerous strikes of a wooden hammer
Here we are shallow dish shape......
Doesn't quite look like en egg cup yet....
Getting there.....
I've ruined it! Only joking, new technique called raising which brings up the sides to close up the top to hold the egg. Does NOT look good at this point!
Using a metal stake to strike against......
Using a different type of hammer for this part. All those tiny dimples on the silver are created by the strikes of this hammer......
Now that looks like it could hold an egg!
And now a maths lesson! I decided on a cone shaped base for the egg cup to sit on so this was how I worked out the dimensions....
....to finish! TA DA!!!! I left the texture left by all those thousands of hammer strikes as I love the effect on the cup and kept the base plain as a contrast, polishing the outside and giving the inside a matt finish.
Will I ever make an egg cup again? Unlikely, but never say never! I will definitely be using the techniques I've learnt to create new pieces of jewellery though.
Hope he likes it :-)