Monday, December 21, 2009

My New Rings!

After Mt. Bromo, it was back on the bus for 13 hours to head to Yogyakarta (pronounced Jogjakarta) the cultural center of Java. We spent our first day walking aimlessly around the city and had every intention of doing another sunrise trip yesterday, but…. We slept in! So instead we took a 3 hour walk across the city to check out some art classes. We ended up signing up for a 3 hour silver jewelry making class.

We payed our fee and ate lunch at the ViaVia Café, and then took a 20 minute ride down to the silver-smith’s workshop on these little pedi-cabs.


It was a lovely ride, until these guys later ripped us off… but that’s another story. (we've been lucky enough to get the "foreigner discount" on almost every purchase here in Indonesia, from water to sunscreen, hotels to taxis...)

Nick and I both decided to make rings (the other option was a pendant) and we had 4g of silver to work with. We came up with two rough designs; mine was a mountain with a sunrise – going along with our reoccurring sunrise theme on this trip, Nick’s was a row of waves – for our endless summer!

Our first step was to measure our silver band and begin to form the wire our desired pattern out of silver wire… easier said than done. Just to make some waves and swirls we had a heck of a time. Eventually, we ended up heating the wire up a bit to make our jobs easier.




After that, we used these little stamps and tapped some words into what would become the inside of our band – mine said “Yogya 09”


The next step was a difficult one – soldering. It’s actually pretty straight forward, but my hands aren’t very steady and I was having a heck of a time getting my little wires to sit on my little ring band just right.




After soldering was done, I used a hammer and some little stamps to give my mountain some texture


And then it was time to bend our little silver strips into rings – since Nick was making his ring for me (he’s not a big fan of jewelry) here he is giving me the ring to try on for size.



After that just some filing and polishing…






And next thing you know, I have two new silver rings!



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