Fire Wing Crafts

Largesse was requested for the royal gift exchange at Gulf Wars 2018. Coming off making coronets, it felt like I had too much free time, so I volunteered for something metal. Calontir had Meridies, who's current royals were 12th century English and Anglo-Saxon. After spending some time looking around the British Museum collection, I decided on a disc brooch, based on this.
DesignThe disc brooch appeared to be two layers riveted together at five points, with a pin riveted on the back along the line formed by three of the rivets. The museum lists the brooch as being made of gilded brass for the back and silver for the top, along with some niello (silver mixed with sulfur, creates a black inlay) in a cross pattern.
There was a nice overhead shot provided by the museum, so I was able to play with it in GIMP and make a template for sawing out.



After sawing it out, I had the pattern for the top in place, but the edges were square, while the extant piece had very beveled edges. 
To try t…

While I was working on Galen's Coronet and my dirty dozen entry, I knocked out a heraldic kite brooch for myself I've been wanting to do for a while and a mokume-style ring... well, because it was there. I also had a last minute request come in for some strawberry leaves.

Not as many pictures here as usual, since I was just making stuff (and panicking to get projects done), not planning a blog post.
BroochA kite brooch is basically a pin with a diamond flap on a hinge. The pin goes in the cloth, a string attached to one side of the brooch comes down, under where the pin exits the fabric and is secured on the other side to hold the brooch in place, and the decorative "kite" swings down over the whole thing to make it pretty. I made this to replace the really basic penannular brooch I was using to secure my brat with something fancier.
The brooch is two layers; a solid backing with the border and fox sawed out then soldered in place on top.
This project gave me a chanc…

At Coronation, Konstantia sponsored a dirty dozen largesse competition. For my entry, I made a dozen small metal containers with cabochons on the lids.

Construction The process began with cutting out a lot of rectangles out of sheet metal. They were then formed into ovals over a bracelet mandrel and bound with wire to hold the seam in place during soldering. When making any kind of circle like this, if you form the oval so the ends overlap then pull them back to form the seam, the ends of the metal will push against each other as they try to spring back into place and help you get a nice seam. The binding wire adds extra insurance that nothing springs out of place as the metal expands when it is heated. After soldering, the cylinders are rounded back out over a round forming mandrel using a non-metal hammer (rawhide, rubber, nylon, delrin, and the like). Using a softer hammer like this ensures you don't leave marks on the metal. Once the pieces were all rounded, they got cut abou…