Maple leaf pendant

I just thought I'd share a pretty little pendant I made as a welcome home present for a beautiful friend of mine who had been away overseas in Canada for more than a year. She has been thoroughly enjoying herself experiencing everything so unlike Australia. Like snow for instance, lots of it, and very long cold winters, but mainly the Autumn (Fall) where all the leaves gradually change colours (yes that is correct spelling for colours in Australia) and fall off the trees. She stayed in Vancouver where they had huge trucks and machinery to collect up all the leaves and cart them away. So I decided to make her a Maple leaf pendant, the obvious choice for Canada, but also perfect to make out of copper, as maple leaves go through a coppery phase as they change from green to brown. Now I'm no expert on Maple leaves so I needed a good image to work from. I Googled up a heap of images, many of them highly stylized and not very realistic looking. Then I found an image of a Canadian silver dollar with an excellent maple leaf on it.

I got a copy of it and worked out what size I wanted the pendant to be. I then, as usual converted millimeters to pixels, re-sized it and then printed it out the correct size for the pendant. All I had to do then was stick the image to the copper sheet using double sided tape and cut it out. I lightly hammered it a bit to give it a wavy leafy look and used wires to hammer the major vein lines onto the copper.The smaller veins were just scratched on freehand using the image as a guide. Next I made a little loop and soldered it on the back in such a way as to strengthen the stem a bit but still be invisible from the front. This was done using a fairly hard silver solder so that it won't fall off when I solder the heart on. When the leaf was done I sketched a little heart on a little sheet of sterling silver and cut it out with my jewellers saw. This heart is what I call sexy or sassy style. It's non symmetrical with uneven sized tops and curvy tip, and appears little taller than it is wide. I domed it to give it some thickness and depth and then gave it a hammered texture with a miniature ball pein hammer. It is soldered on using silver soldering paste, which is perfect for this type of job, but you have to be careful not to get it in the wrong place or you end up with little silvery marks in unwanted places. For the final finishing it was of course filed and smoothed all round.I mainly do that with a heavy duty wire brush on my bench grinder. (safety glasses essential!) It gives it a finish similar to tumbling I guess, but very quickly. The patina is done by playing with the heat and also using liver of sulphur to blacken it and then buffing most of it off using a calico buffing wheel. I'm very happy with how it came out, and it looks great on her! Success!