yes I've been a slack girl this week!!!
I took the Level II PMC certification class at William Holland last week with Ken Devos as the instructor. There were 8 students in the class- not near the um- energy as my class at Wildacres :)
The class was awesome!!! The 6 required projects were: Ring with inlaid brass wire - shined to a mirror finish Pendant made with porcelain pieces Piece made with enamels A set of clasps Pendant or earrings using the 24k gold paste as an accent Pendant set with a natural stone (bezel set after the pieces was fired).
I loved learning all the new techniques. The only problem I had was with my ring- I was sanding it before firing - a bit too assertively I guess - and broke it into 4 pieces. After repairing and breaking it 2 or 3 more times ! I finally got it ready to fire. Shew. But as they say -with PMC there are no broken pieces, no messed up pieces, just unfinished pieces :)
I know there were questions about the bezel settings - so here's how it is done (very short version). You make a base using PMC + or 3, take the bezel wire and get it to fit your stone, then place the bezel wire into the un-fired PMC piece. Make sure the joint is nice (No soldering necessary - we used tension to keep the joint together- although one guy who also does silversmithing soldered his.) Fire. Check it out- if all is ok - set the stone.
Lessons learned - don't push the bezel wire too far into the PMC- I did and ended up with a hole that I needed to fill. I filled the hole and added a layer of PMC sheet to the back of the base to really fill it out (2 additional firings). Some of the other students used really large stones and had to do a tiny bit of stone grinding (dremel, fordam) to get the stones to fit after firing. And one person made a huge bale on the back that caused her piece to bow and the stone wouldn't sit flat.
Since the bezel wire is already metal it doesn't shrink. We used cabs in our projects, but I'm sure if you are good at setting stones, you could probably do something similar with faceted stones. I was very excited about doing this project- I have NO experience with setting stones and I was able to do it - and it looks pretty good.
I'm looking forward to playing with all these techniques. If you have questions feel free to ask or email me.
Pictures can be seen on my webshots album - jewelry - under the PMC page. I put all the new ones at the front. There are double pics of a couple of pieces- I've got a new digital camera and I'm playing with it :)