I appreciate every piece of jewellery about 100 per cent more than I did before I took one of Don Sankey’s five-hour silversmithing workshops on a recent weekend in Abu Dhabi. The man was spot on when he said we would need to start “breaking down the creative barrier”. While he finds most people get insecure at the design phase – a pencil and rectangular piece of paper is all that is involved – my severe doubts came during execution.
What I had wanted to do was bend the silver into a band, having first weaved and then soldered three delicate silver wires around it. Sankey gave my plan a confidence-bolstering “cool” and I was on my way.
My co-amateur silversmiths were soon merrily sawing and filing away on their amazing-sounding creations – one was crafting an impressive skyline of the city, complete with mosque; another was bending much bigger wire into a funky flower. Yet while they were silversmithing up a storm, I was floundering, given the allotted time, my beginner status and fingers that had suddenly started to feel as big as Subway sandwiches. I am an optimist, but the required filing of divots on both the top and bottom of each wire, in corresponding places where I wanted them to cross, was proving impossible.
And so I spent a silent half-hour slowly wilting, wondering if I could give up and slink away without anyone noticing.
Once I decided leaving wasn’t an option, it took everything I had to ask for Don’s help. Time was a-wasting, so he suggested forgetting the criss-crossing, dropping a wire, and arranging the remaining two wires to lay flat, in waves, on the band.
After making sure the two wires had one side sanded onto a flat surface, to adhere to the ring, Don helped me use a material called flux to join the wires to the band and guided my hands with the solder gun.
With the wires attached, the silver was very tough to bend into a band and so I had to enlist Don’s strength to bend it into a ring. He helped later on, too, when I needed to solder the join together. I pounded that all into a ring shape on a mandrel, filed and sanded all signs of the join away, and popped the whole thing into a gentle acid bath – it’s called pickling and it’s done to clean the silver and remove any impurities – before treating it to a nice polish.
The result was gorgeous, and appreciated so much more because I (and, well, Don) had made it.
For more information about Don Sankey and how to book the class click here
