Titanium Druzy Pendant

Druzies are rocks with tiny crystals at their heart.  They are beautiful in their own right and I much prefer the natural ones to the crazy never-seen-in-nature colours a lot of sellers are carrying.  Titanium druzy is the exception to my natural colour rule because they are just so darned gorgeous.  The plain druzy is enhanced by Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) in which it is subjected to a gaseous enviroment that contains titanium.  The titanium molecules bond with the mineral, creating a spectacular rainbow of colours.

This is my druzy.


What to do with it was the big problem.  I'm not an experienced metalsmith but running a wire through the little hole at the top just didn't seem right. 

Since I changed my life and moved to PEI, I basically gave up planning and rely mostly on instinct.  Much more relaxing, except when it affects the bank account.  But in this case, planning was required.  I traced the front and back, sketched my idea for capturing it and laid out a proper diagram.  The silver triangle was the base and since I was going to be doing more soldering on top of it, it had to be fused together with medium solder.  I would have used hard, but my torch doesn't seem to be hot enough.  And I could have just fused it, since it was Argentium, but I was afraid that I'd melt it apart when I was doing the next round of soldering.

It wasn't easy.  The prong wires were laid across the triangle, a looped one for the bail and two wires across the triangle for the side prongs.  The first go-round with easy solder, the bail wires, bottom wire and half the top wire soldered well.  One side of the upper bail was sitting too high and didn't fuse.  So...bent the wire down, put another blob of easy solder on it, tried to make sure I heated the triangle first...the wire fused to the triangle but I melted the middle of the bottom prong wires.  It might have been an "oh shit" moment, but for the fact that I had planned to saw the middle of the wires off anyway. 

The bottom picture shows all the rainbow glory of the druzy, the reason why I just had to have it.  I hope I did it justice.