Paper

Day P in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. P as in Paper.

Paper is a great help to try out a design idea. A piece of thick enough paper can help you see if and how your abstract idea works in practice.

Not to say that a paper model is any guarantee that you will get the result you had in mind, not at all! But it can be useful at the beginning of the process. It can satisfy your immediate curiousity (“I wonder what happens if I…?”), and it can help give you the “go” or “no go” for an idea (“is this what I am looking for here?”).

Paper is similar to a sheet of metal. It is just flat, and you are going to use it to create volume.

After digging into my “archive” I found a few  examples and have put them in the gallery here below, with some comments.

First test ring (silver and titanium): The titanium part worked, now time to rethink/improve the setting.

On this ring, I added some support to the setting.

Next version: thicker ring, so the setting could be embedded in the ring (no support needed)

The last one is pretty different from the first one. The paper prototype helped confirm the idea.

I made some triangular mandrels of thick paper, with tape around (also, wrap a loose paper around, and it’s easier to remove the wire).

Thin silver wire, and I passed the loops through the rolling mill.

I wanted to make irregular columns, but had no idea if/how it would work.

It did work technically, but I never finished them (I think there was no “click” when I saw them).

I never tried this in metal. It could also be a way to use odd rest or scrap pieces.

paper is perfect to get an idea of the dimensions for a spiral.

More spiral tests (using rest pieces).

At Easter, I discovered that the foil around chocolate eggs can be useful too!

Now, this was all about a very humble role that paper can play in jewellery making.

Paper is also “the” material to use for some jewellery makers. To discover more about them, just google “paper jewellery” (or “jewelry”) and see what you get! There is one person I don’t want you to miss, so check Jeremy May’s literary jewels (literally unique pieces of books). Also, if you like origami, you can find a lot of origami jewellery on Etsy.

Thank you for reading (even if this was brought to you digitally, and not on paper).