We have moved!

Finally it happened… Not only is jewelry my hobby, but now I also have a huge workshop! Well not exactly huge, but sufficiently big for all the equipment, instruments, and whatnot. It also has enough room for 4 people to work in without constantly having to bump into each other, and most importantly, its separated from the other rooms, unlike before, where the worktable was located in the living room.

Speaking of other rooms…  Before the last trip, I forgot to put the silver into a separate box, and left the unfinished project on the table. When we came back, right before we moved, we melted around 2 and a half pounds of silver, for later use in the new workshop. But later on, I caught grandma trying to put little metallic objects into the box filled with silver, claiming that, everything that looks like metal in our house has to be silver, and in the end we had quite a bit of staples in the box.

We make jewelry using silver acquired form the bank, mixed with a calculated amount of “S-88” which is an anti-allergenic alloy, to get 925 sterling silver. We check the purity of the leftovers from previous projects, put them into the box of silver, and for the next melting, we take part of the leftovers form the box, add in some new silver form the bank, and the S-88 alloy. That way we always have good quality silver, and make sure that there’s no waste.

When we moved here, first we put up the rolling mill, rolled a strip of silver from the last melting, and guess what we found? That’s right, staples from a stapler, melted into the silver.

 And now 2.5 pounds of silver from the last melting will have to be refined. Just under half a pound of silver was contaminated, but I can’t risk the metal getting contaminated further, and thus, I have to refine the entire 2.5 pounds. Since I like huge projects, refining 2.5 pounds of silver will be lots of fun.

We could’ve sent the silver for purification to a refinery, but we love experiencing new things, and thus, refining the silver will be my next photo display, so make sure to buy some popcorn. :)