My name is Angela Talbert.
I am a jewelry artist and metalsmith based
in central Vermont.
I specialize in hand-fabricated botanical pieces
and jewelry made from beach-combed sea glass
and sea pottery.
And today, I'm going to walk you through the steps
of making a pair of my dandelion blossom earrings.
First thing that I'm going to do is go out
and gather some fresh dandelion leaves.
And I am going to glue those to a piece of adhesive paper
and then stick that adhesive paper
to a sheet of jeweler's brass.
I'm going to use that as my saw guide cut out my leaves.
Once my leaves are all cut out, then the next step
is going to be making a center vein for those leaves.
So I'm going to take a piece of, again, jeweler's brass wire.
And with one hand, I'm going to hold it in place on the leaf,
and using the other hand and a pair
of pliers to bend it into shape.
And then once those are all in shape comes
my very favorite part, the soldering.
It is metalsmithing glue.
It's what brings everything together.
And I use a little Smith oxyacetylene torch
for all of my work.
It's my favorite tool.
The next step is going to be sawing out the layers
of petals for the flower blossoms.
Each blossom is constructed of a stack of five discs,
and each disc is divided into 24 individual petals.
So first, I'm going to cut each petal out individually.
I'm using a GreenLion saw frame, an excellent,
excellent jeweler's saw.
Once the petals are all cut out, I drill a hole
through the center of the stack so that I can thread
a piece of brass wire through when I solder them together
so that they stay in place.
First, I'm going to go in with a burr bit on my flex shaft,
which is a rotary tool and one of my favorite tools in
the studio because it saves a ton of time and labor.
Then I'm going to go in with a steel punch
and add a slightly different texture
to each of those petals because I really want them
to have a lot of character before I go on to the next step.
Once the petals are all finished and textured,
it is time to take the stack and solder them together.
This is probably one of the trickier parts in the process
because each petal is quite thin and delicate.
The next step is creating those quintessential
little floret bundles at the center of a dandelion.
Which I created by cutting many, many little lengths
of brass wire and bundling them together.
The other part of the center is the curled stigma pieces.
And for those, I am taking small pieces
of 20-gauge brass wire and sawing them down the center.
And then carefully bending those two halves
into little curlicues with a pair of roundnose pliers.
It is quite difficult to saw a piece
of 0.8 mm wire perfectly down the center.
And so I ended up probably ruining as many of these
as I successfully made.
The center bundle, as I said, has been filed flat
and will be soldered right to the base.
But the curled stigmas are going to be individually attached
by drilling a hole for each of them into the base
and inserting them into the blossom before soldering.
Once the blossoms are all put together, one last bit
of soldering that I have to do is soldering two of
those dandelion leaves together to create
the hoop of the earrings.
So I'm going to solder them together and then hammer them
into shape and add jump rings to the blossoms
and to the leaf hoops so that
I can attach them all together.
The very last part of the fabrication process is going to
be lots of polishing and cleaning and patina-ing the pieces.
And then everything is connected together.
And that is the completed dandelion hoop earring.