Chasing the raised Silver Wine Cup
This is the first part of chasing the sterling silver wine cup that I raised from a disk a little while ago. I delayed the work on this cup because I wanted to have a mold made so that I could have blanks raised by metal spinning that would meet the size that I needed. Here’s a photo of the one I raised by hand and the copy I had made from the new mold. Mine is on the right.
I used the surface gauge to mark the final height at 75 mm and then used shears to trim the cups down to equal size. The off cuts will become a cuff and parts for a bracelet.
Then I used the surface gauge to mark up the borders on one cup. This is the first time I am working in 18 gauge silver so I am taking it slowly and trying to be as accurate as I can. I decided to decorate this cup with my first design. It’s a simpler than a later design that I really want to do but the later design requires me to make repoussè circles with which I have not hadmuch success. Once the horizontal lines were in place I divided the bottom into 12 parts and extended lines up the sides with a triangle and a sharpie. Mylar stencilswere made from my original drawing and I laid them out with an erasable sharpie onto the cup. This is a large photo to show most of my work surface.
Here is the cup with the bottom panel drawn in, I used the stencils again when I drew the design with the scratch awl, then I drew the border the same way.
Everything was scratched in and I began working with the chasing tool.
Once all the lines were chased in I began to press the background down on one side of the chased lines to give the leaves some relief.
Now the background is being pushed down evenly. I decided not to texture it yet because there is some snarling in the cup’s future. After it is snarled it will have to be annealed which will soften the whole cup, detailing after that will make it hard and usable again, if I do it now, it will mean that I will have to do it again which will leave undesirable double impressions.
The background is down and the leaves begin to get some sculptural detail.
The background of the border has to be lowered as well as the bottom part of the cup.
Then I began to matte the border background.
The border has been matted and I have begun to close the lip just a little. I want to sketch in a design on the bottom before I remove the pitch. When I showed this at school last Friday, Gennady , Rebekah and Michael all said, at different times, that I need to lift the leaves and border out more. They can’t all be wrong, I was satisfied with the relief so far but after I saw the difference in the lotus bowl I understand what they were expecting of the piece. That’s the reason I started the lotus bowl over the weekend. I wasn’t sure how much the snarling iron would change the relief on this cup. I don’t want it getting too wide or fat. When I start to detail the leaves I know that it will go in a bit so I guess it makes sense to push out more first.
