Make a Simple Silver Cuff

1. Intro to silver cuffs: Hi, I'm Kelly Diamond from Metal Morphs jewelry studio here in Syracuse New York. Tday I want to show you how to make these cuff bracelets. They are fairly simple and straightforward to make and they're made just using a few tools and materials that you may have on hand or that are easy to get your hands on. I'm going to show you how to measure your risk so that you get a perfect size cuff and then how to cut it, file it, form it, polish it, and patina so that you can wear it proudly and say what you made. These are perfect. If you have an unusually sized wrist, you can make them so that they fit you nicely, and you can also make them as gifts or even to sell. They're also very easy to pop a little stone on here. If you decide that you do want to solder and add a little bit of embellishment to it, they would be beautifully done like that as well. I hope you enjoy this project. Please post your finished bracelets in our student section, the project section so that we can cheer you on and see how you did. Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing m of. 2. Materials and Tools: Here are some of the tools you're going to need to make your bracelets. The first thing you're going to need is the wire itself. These are a few different designs that I purchased from Rio Grande. Some of them have a pattern in them and some of them don't. You can get some really cool if you look under pattern wire, you can get some cool different designs. Or you can buy something called low dome wire, which has a nice curve to it and is a little bit wider than a half round wire. These are a half round wire that is a little heavier gauge, probably a six, and this is a low dome wire, and I believe it's a four. I'll definitely double check and put those in document for you. Other things that you're going to need are a bracelet mandrill. This particular mandrill has a tang. It's meant to be used in a vice. This one is a free standing. They're both oval and tapered, but this one stands up straight on its own and the other one can be put into a vice. You need a sharpie. You need a plastic or raw hide mallet, a metal file, a ruler. Something to cut your metal with. This is a jeweler saw. You may be able to get away with just using a flush cutter depending on the thickness of your metal. You also need a tape measure to measure your wrist size. These are optional, but these are for use in the flux shaft or drummel tool, and they are the Dt Co. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but the sunburst wheels that we use for removing scratches and polishing, things like that. Those are optional, but they can be helpful. Other things that would be handy to have for polishing would be either a buffing machine, if you have one of those handy or even a tumbler and the tumbler can make your jewelry nice and shiny. These are good starting tools and can get you a nice bracelet made. 3. Measure and cut your cuff: First thing you're going to want to do is measure your wrist size. We're going to use a tape measure for this. One of the things that's important about using a tape measure is that you start from the zero when you're measuring and not from the end of the tape. Some of my students have gotten themselves into a bit of a bind because they start from the end and rather from the zero. If you look here, I'm wrapping it around right above my wrist phone, that is where you want to measure and mine's coming in at a six, and you want to subtract a half an inch for that for measuring your wire. I would make mind for a 5.5 and I would just take my metal and put it right on my ruler. Again, starting from the beginning of your ruler here, not from the end of your ruler, where the numbers start. That's where you're going to measure from, not from the end of your ruler, you get an inaccurate number. Then I would just trim off a bit here at the 5.5 and that would be where I would begin. On the width and thickness of my metal. I might be able to cut it with a cutter like this, a flush cutter with the flush side to the part I'm going to keep, the flat side to the part I'm going to keep. That's what I did with this piece because it was thin enough to do that. But you might also, if you're using something heavier such as this metal, this low dome metal is very thick, I would not be able to cut it with this. In this case, I would want to use my jar saw. I would want to mark my line on the top here, and then I would want to use Mdular saw, I'm going to turn to my bench pen here. I would want to cut straight down on my mark where I marked it. If I've tried to do it the long way like this way, it's going to be harder and take me longer. I want to put my metal flat and cut through the least amount of material on my mark. But in this case, I'm using this little bit ther gauge, so I was able to just cut it with my flesh covers. Once you have your piece cut, we're going to move on to filing the edges. 4. Filing the Edges: Next, we're going to file the edges of our metal. Right now they're sharp and poky. What I want to do is use my file to round out those edges and smooth them, just take off the sharpness that's there. As you can see, I'm filing on the curve because I want that metal to curve nicely. I'm going to flip it over to the other side. It doesn't take a lot. You don't have to do a lot of filing with this. Just enough to smooth and I'm going to come down along this top edge so that everything feels smooth to the touch. I'm going to do both sides like that. Bring it back on my pin, following the curve. This is a number two cut Swiss file, so it removes material pretty quickly. I go over the top again, just smoothing that out. If you can see what I'm doing and coming down over the top like that. Just to smooth the top, the back edge. I have a little sharpie on there. You can take that off with some rubbing alcohol, going back to the other side to make sure everything feels good. Smooth to the touch. And it does, then I'm ready to form my met a the mandra. 5. Forming Your Cuff (1): Now that everything is smooth, I'm ready to use my bracelet mandrel to wrap my piece around. I'm going to begin by forming it just with my fingers. It's a weird angle. This thing is a triangular shape. It has a tang down here and this is meant to be put into a vice. But just for the sake of camera angles, I'm going to hold it here and just show you what I'm doing. I'm going to just come around and start pushing down with my fingers. That's the front side. This is the back side. I'm just bringing it around. Depending on how big your bracelet is, you may need to go closer to the top of your mandrol, where it's thinner, or if it's a larger cuff, you're going to go down towards the bottom. We're then going to use our yellow hammer or raw hide hammer to start pounding down the middle and getting it into shape. I have a couple of different sizes of mandrills. Since mine is a 5.5, I may need to step down to a smaller bracelet mandrill. They make some that are stepped mandrills. They have different sizes on those, Rio make some of those, and those are great to use with They have little steps in them where you can do bigger sizes, smaller sizes in there. I'm going to periodically flip this so that I'm evening it on both sides. It's an oval. You can also lay it flat this way. You can get a it a little differently. But as you can see, it's starting to take shape into a cuff. I still a little wonky, still needs a little bit more work. I think I'm going to step down to my smaller man. I can get it a little tighter. This is my smaller bracelet mand and as you can see, I can get it mo a touch there. It's got a narrower top edge here. I'm going to flip it. Do a little more. Again, if I have this in the device with the tang, I'll just be working around at different angles, but I want you to be able to get a good view of what it will look like. It's coming along. I'll just keep refining a little bit. What I'm going to do is just check and make sure it fits my wrist. It does hit my wrist n. I can give it a little squeeze together here and it's going to be a good size and shape. I'll work on bringing those edges a bit down. If you are not able to get your edge here, as much as you want. You can also use a half round plier and just bring the half round side of it inside of your bracelet and just give it a gentle little curve down to flatten it out a little bit so that it looks more like that. 6. Polishing Your cuff (1): Now that I have my bracelet into the shape that I want, I'm going to start to polish it. There are a few different ways you can polish. This one is a very low tech way to do it. This is a flash shiner that's typically used for nails, but it works well on metal too. The downside of it is it doesn't get into the little crevices, the way that a tumbler or rotary tools would. But it is very accessible and easy to use. You just follow the instructions on the front, the three step process. Use the gray side first, then the green side, then the white side, and you just go over your metal. This is the gray side. This is the green side. And by the time you get to the white side, you're going to start to get a nice polish on there and you can see a bit of the shine coming up there, maybe. That's one way that you can use. I wanted to quickly show you how to use the sunburst wheels to clean out your clean and polish your piece. If you're starting from the top of the list, these are the actual rubber wheels, and we're going to start with yellow, then go to white and red. You would normally work your way down through all of these. I'm just going to show you a few of them just to give you an idea on how they work. This is my flex shaft. You can also put these in a dremel tool and I have a foot pedal down below that I'm going to be using to actually see if we can zoom in here so that you can just see the vent. Here's my piece. We're going to just start going over this because it has these we can see the little fibers here. They can get right down into your piece and just start to it's going to take away any scratch marks. I'm not going to spend too much time with the yellow and white. Those are a little bit more aggressive than I actually need. I'm just going to do a little quick once over with these. And I'm going to move down to red. Sorry about my camera moving. It's so a little bit of an angle here. Red is actually great. This maroon color. It's not actually red, but Moon is great for taking P. So if you need to get into those ces and take some blackness out, this is a good one. The good wheel for doing that. Okay. And then you will continue just to work your way down. The next one would be blue. I guess maybe I will go through all of these just so you can kind of see the difference as it moves along. Put my weight on there, so we'll stop bench block, we'll weigh it down. So when you get to blue, you're starting to get into these polished stages. There's blue. Let's see if we can find a pink one. My pink one is missing, so I'm going to go right to orange. My tools wander off over to the studio stations. So you can see having a dremel or a fleck shaft is a really handy tool because it's going to allow you to do a lot of things that you need to do in jewelry making world. So there are so many different attachments and fits and things that you can do here. I actually have a big polishing wheel here, too. I guess that would be our fourth way that we could there's so many ways you can polish things, so that would be another way. All right. So that's green. That would be the last one of the rubber wheels. I'm now going to show you how you would put a little zam onto a buff. And this is going to act in the same way that here's my a. I'm going to run my buff through the Z and make a big mess on myself here. Then I'm going to go over the piece with that with a polishing compound on it. And now you're going to really start to see a drastic difference. So you can see. Maybe you can see. So that's one side, that's the other side. So it's starting to put a little blackness of the compound in there. We're going to kind of run it at a medium speed. And it's going to shine my piece up nicely. Okay. So now I'm getting quite a bit of shine on here. I can go at it in different directions. I want to make sure you really hold tight to it, have your safety glasses on. We don't want this getting ripped away from you. You can also put it right on your bench pin here. I'm not sure if you can see me so that it secures it better and kind of feed it into the little peg. Yeah. I'm starting to see a lot of shine on here, and I'm liking that. Getting quite a good shine. So I'm going to take this over to the sink and wash that up with some dawn on a toothbrush and get that nice and clean so that we can lack in it and make it again. 7. Adding patina: Now that I've cleaned my piece, I'm going to just go over it with some rubbing alcohol. I've put some dawn on a toothbrush and given it a scrub. But I'm also just going to go over it with some rubbing alcohol just to make sure there isn't any oily residue on here that could interfere with my patina. I'm just wiping it down and you can see there is still some coming off. I want to get most of that greasy stuff out. Then I'm going to take I'm going to use today. There's a couple of different things I like to use, but with silver, I like this silver blackener that isn't made by Jacks. I'm going to put my glove on here on the hand that's going to be holding the bracelet. I'm going to use a paint brush. To paint on this blackener. Then after I get it all blackened, I have some baking soda water prepared here that I'm going to put it in, and then I just have some fresh water that I'm going to rinse it in after that. My first step after cleaning it is going to be to just dip my paint brush in the jacks and just start painting it on and as you can see it instantly starts blackening it. I want to make sure it's getting down into those crevices because I'm going to clean the surface part of this off and I want to leave the patina down in the crevices. It's not a bad idea to wear a mask while you're doing this. I stay far away from it, so I'm not breathing it in, but it's not good stuff. You want to be in a well ventilated area while you're using it. I think I have it mostly covered. Come back in here and get these edges. Sorry, there's a lot of traffic noise outside today. It's rush hour here in Syracuse. Earlier, when I was trying to record, there were lots of sirens going by. Something is going. Now I'm going to just drop that right in the baking soda. I'm going to cover Jack's back up. Then I'm just going to take it out of the baking soda and put it in the regular rinse. I'm going to get rid of my glove, rinse out my paint brush too. Now I have my bracelet that has the patina on it. I'm just going to dry it with a paper towel. Then you can either use a polishing pad. I like to use a polishing pad for this particular part because I can also clean the inside rather than the flash shiner is great for cleaning the outside, but it's hard to get on the inside. A little polishing pad, little pro polished pads are great for cleaning off the excess oxides that are on here and reshining your piece. I'm just going to start going over my piece with this. I can do the inside, get that all cleaned off and the outside. It's going to take me a couple minutes to get this done, but you can start to get the idea. That's all I'm doing. I'm just rubbing it over, coming on the inside, cleaning it off there as well. Then when I'm all done, I'll come back and show you what it looks like when it's finished. 8. Sealing the Cuff with Wax: My bracelet is nice and shiny again and it has this nice patina. I'm hoping you can see that. See a little cc. It has this really nice patina. It gives it this antique finish and really pulls out the pattern. What I'm going to do next is just take a little bit of this renaissance wax, and I'm going to put a little bit on my finger, and I'm going to just spread it all along on my bracelet. Ale bit goes a long way. This one smells like shoe polish. I'm just going to spread it all over the bracelet, front and back. I'm going to let it sit there for a minute. Then after it for a minute or so I'm just going to take a dry piece of paper towel and I'm going to go back in and just buff off any extra with my paper towel and that will give it a nice finish and it will protect that for some time. That is your last step. Once you have it all cleaned up, you will be totally ready to wear. Mine still has wax on it, but it's going to look great. 9. Share Your Work: I hope you enjoy learning how to make these type of bracelets, and I hope that you will also go into the student section and post what you've made so that we can give you some feedback and cheer on your efforts. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions and good luck on making your first cups.