After a couple months of working on it, it's finally finished!
When I started this piece, it was because I wanted to do some more work with my sheet silver and stone setting, but I didn't want to cut into my beautiful sheets of unused silver as I have some very specific plans for. So, I went scrounging through my scrap sheet to see what could be made from the bits leftover from my previous projects.
How do you like the result?
Design wise, the piece (not surprisingly) has a very strong Art Nouveau or Arts & Crafts influence, but the sharp, geometric shapes of the scrap silver (at least to me) has a rather science fiction feel to it. Sort of like Tolkien's elves meets Star Trek's Vulcans or Klingons (if you know what the Vulcan and Klingon emblems look like, I'm sure you'll see what I mean.
The darker, slightly purplish metal that you see in the necklace is tantalum. Tantalum is a very rare metal that's related to another, slightly more familiar metal, called niobium and like niobium is hypoallergenic. It's a very strong metal that's, typically, used in scientific and medical equipment because of its strength and because it does not corrode.
It's a beast to work worth, but I absolutely love the colour of the metal, especially paired with sterling silver! The contrast is just gorgeous!
The stones are Labradorite and Black Spinel and all settings (except for the tiny tube setting) were made by hand. The chains of the necklace include a micromaille Half Persian 3in1 chain with patterned wire links interspersed in it, and a graduated end chain that starts with a graduated, segmented Orc Weave and then transitions to a graduated Byzantine chain and, finally, to a mixed element chain of Byzantine and patterned wire links.
Photographing this was a real pain as, besides the issue of getting the metal tones correct (silver likes to reflect the colours around it and, with tantalum, capturing the purple hue can be tricky), Labradorite is not the easiest stone to photograph. To get the labradorescent colour flashes to show that it is known for, it all depends on how the stone has been cut and how the light hits the stone. So, if you don't get it just right, all you will see if the flecked grey body colour of the stone and miss the phenomena that the gem is known for.
The necklace measures at just below 19.5 inches long with the focal setting have a depth of about 1 7/8 inch.
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