Transcript
Courtney Gray: Welcome to Creative Side Jewelry Academy of Austin, online at creativeside.org. I’m Courtney Gray. I started my school here, Creative Side Jewelry Academy, four years ago. I’m here in Austin, and I’m going to tell you about jewelry making today.
Jewelry Making: Attaching Jewelry Pieces without Soldering
In jewelry making, there’s a lot of ways to attach your metals together. You can work hot, using a torch and soldering the pieces together, or you can work with cold connections. I’m going to talk to you today about creating those cold connections, different types of cold connections that you can use to combine metals, as well as found objects and Plexiglas. A lot of found objects and thinner metals cannot be heated, so you absolutely need to learn about cold connections. A lot of jewelers don’t really even use a torch – they simply use these cold connections to create beautiful jewelry.
What I’m going to talk to you about right now is what we call a rivet. A wire rivet is simply a piece of wire that’s been fed through and cut off about a millimeter on each side and then hammered on each side of the metal to secure those two pieces together. This one’s been riveted all the way around. We have a wonderful class here called “Cold Connections: Jewelry without a Torch” is what we call it. This is another type of rivet. It’s an open rivet or a tube rivet. This piece will not come apart, it has been hammered on each side, so it’s secure, it’s solid, and it’s a great way to put jewelry together.
