Brooches

So for my brooch project I decided instead of using of making my forms into hydrolic dye forms I thought why not try a new technique and learn something new cause I love learning new techniques in jewelry and metalsmithing. So I decided to incorporate metalsmithing and jewelry together by making Spiculums, yay! Heh, any while looking at Kate's book on metal forms, I really like the different forms that you could create with just a flat sheet of metal, and I thought spiculums would work in my designs that I had.

In this project my inspiration was DNA, but not the DNA proteins but chromatin, and mitochondria. As a former Biology major, I enjoyed looking at plant cells and animal cells under a microscope, I found it quite interesting how tiny they looked but I was fascinated by them, and I wanted to learn more. Getting side tracked, short story I knew that I wanted to translate my passion of cell structures and forms into this brooch project, so I went with mitochondria and chromatin.

Below are some of my sketches that I made for the project and my beginning progress of the making spiculums =)

Above I started with 22G and went down to 26G in copper, boy was that a work out thinning them all out, made some extras just in case. =)