Studio Saturday

a nature inspired necklace, jewelry making technique - riveting

Hi and welcome to my Studio Saturday blog. Today I want to talk about a necklace inspired by the Fairy Duster plant. And I’ll talk about the technique of riveting in jewelry.

The necklace is made up of small sterling silver disks that have been riveted together. The focal piece is a cluster of “heat riveted” or “pinned” seed beads clustered to resemble the Fairy Duster Bloom. You can read more about it here.

While some heat is used in this piece the majority of the necklace uses a technique called riveting which is a form of a cold connection.

Cold connection is a term that refers to the process of joining together two pieces of metal without the use of heat. A cold connection provides a beautiful, yet raw look, which can be used in several ways. And in this case, it adds movement to the necklace.

I used heat to make the initial ball on the wire and used a riveting hammer to finish creating my sterling silver rivets.

This video explains the process well

One can also use sterling silver tubing for rivets. I use tubing to cold connect my beads to silver.

I said that the Fairy Bloom was created using heat rivets - sometimes called pinning. You form a ball on one end of a sterling wire and in this case thread on seed beads. I inserted the “pins” of beads one at a time into a piece of perforated metal and then carefully applied heat to the top of the wire to form the second ball trapping the pin into the mesh. The mesh is then heat riveted into a sterling silver bead cap.

I hope you found this helpful. Let me know if you make jewelry have you used this technique.

Thanks

Louise x