I'm so excited that I got an order for a popular gift shop and started working on it yesterday. I found a 3' long, by 3" diameter 14gauge piece of copper pipe, and new I could do something with it for my artisan shop.
A friend of mine who is a farrier, and has great horses, was having his lesson with Valerie after mine, so I took the pipe up when I went to watch his lesson. He cut me off some pieces of different widths, and on the way home, I formulated some ideas.
Here is two photos of the pipe and the cut pieces.
It took a lot of filing and sanding to get these clean. I finished two of them, one for a guy or gal with a larger wrist, and one for a woman. I'm restricted by the 3" diameter, but I can make it smaller by indenting 3 or four areas. I took some old barn beam pins, that fit nicely inside the 3". I used masking tape at the top and bottom, covered it in a piece of leather that would fill in the gaps, and that would also allow me to hammer into to make the indentations.
I realised that the piece had to be filed, sanded annealed to soften, and then stamped and marked. Since I had work hardened it, I had to anneal it again before I slipped it over the beam pins. The first time, I loved the shape, but it was a bit too indented to fit me, and so I softened the indentations a bit on the leather sand bag with one of my chasing hammers.
Here are photos of the bangles:
Copper Hammered Clover Mark
Four Leaf Clover Hammered Bangle
Plain Hammered Copper Mark
Plain Hammered Bangle
Copper Anticlast Triangular Bangle
Copper Hammered and Riveted Bangle
Today I also had a great ride on Harry. It was really nice to know we hadn't forgotten everything from yesterday, and we ventured out further into the large arena using it all for our trot and canter transitions. He had a 'moment' which sometimes he likes to do, but I quickly turned him round and that's when we started our canter work. I laughed because it was almost as if he was telling me he really wanted to do something other than trot transitions. Silly horse, it's all good stuff.
