I like to try out what I learned in class at least once. In the Beautiful Bangles class taught by Iris at The Bead Gallery, she twisted square sterling silver wire in two vise grips and then formed the bangles. I made plain bangles to learn the soldering part and wanted to try the twisting. The twisting went well, as the blogless Landcaster convinced me his wrenches would just as well for the twisting and that I did not need to go shopping for vise grips (although they had cute yellow ones at Checkers). Alas, my tiny creme brulee torches were not powerful enough to heat up the silver hot enough to solder but a quick trip to The Bead Gallery fixed that. I snagged some bead strands at 25% off while I was there and got to wish Jamie Happy Birthday.
I would give myself a D for the soldering. The hard part is getting the ends to meet correctly and then being quick enough to see the flash as the solder melts and take the heat away. It's a multitasking deficiency, sigh. Lucky for me, the Landcaster loves anything to do with fire and I'm sure I can convince him to do my solderng next time around.
I polished these in my toy rock tumbler with the stainless silver beads and found out that the drop of detergent is really necessary.
(I really need to take a Photoshop class as I just changed by editing program after years of PaintShopPro to Photoshop and I miss my color replacer tool)
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