The Silver Cup is Finished
It’s been a week of making invitation samples for a client and finishing up the silver wine cup. Silver work had stopped because there were too many pressing demands from my binding work and I needed time to redesign the bottom of the cup. The next designs will not take so long to complete. This cup and its design has taught me a lot. Here’s the new design for the bottom, chased into the cup, I have also started to accentuate the lines and push background down from the flower.
The beginning of this cup is in the April 20th entry of this blog. You could also just click on the word chasing in the word cloud to the right of this entry to see it. It will appear right after this entry, replacing the rest of the July stuff.
You can see I still have trouble making a small circle, I think the curve chaser is too rounded, it tends to dig into the metal I’m chasing instead of traveling smoothly where I strike it. I should make another tool. The large curves are made with the tool designed for straight lines.
After the basic chasing was done, I took the red pitch out of the cup and cleaned it so that I could work from the inside of the cup.
I have made two Snarling Irons. The first one was for pushing larger general forms out from the surface of the cup. The second one, with the narrower top, was made because I couldn’t get to areas near the base in the inside of the cup. Its uneven, angled face was meant to get into the corner where the sides of the cup meet the base. It worked pretty well.
Here’s what the inside looked like after the snarling irons were used. The darker parts inside the cup are where the snarling irons polished the surface as areas were struck and pushed out by the iron’s vibrations. I used repoussè tools to expand the volume of the flower in the bottom.
On Gennady’s advice, I put black pitch into the cup with a large dowel so that I could hold the cup in a vise. The black pitch is more resilient and should allow me to produce a greater depth of relief in the design. In this photo the cup is held in a vise by its dowel extension so that I can work on the sides.
I’m working on the bottom here and in the following photo. The flower rose way too much above the plane of the cup base. After I removed the pitch I was able to knock it back down so that the cup could rest on a table like it should. It was scary and risky but I know how to do it now if it ever happens again.
Here are photos of the finished cup. There’s probably some final polishing to do but this is where it is now.
The bottom medallion.
The inside.
