So when I changed careers over two years ago, one of the wonderful people that I used to work with commissioned me to make her a personalized locket. She figured it would take me awhile but I didn’t think it would take me two years! Sorry Debbie!
To be honest, I didn’t think about the locket much during my first year of my goldsmith apprenticeship. I had much to learn so making a locket wasn’t a priority. I took out her drawings every once and awhile and thought about how I was going to make the locket but then put the drawings away realizing I had no idea what I was doing.
She wanted the locket to have four pages, a leaf border on all the pages, and a tree without leaves on the front. I wasn’t able to add leaves to every page for structural/weight reasons but I ticked everything else off her list.
When I felt sort of ready to tackle the project, I sat down with my dad and started experimenting ways to make the locket. I tried making a locket by hand but it was bulky and didn’t work out very well. I also bought a tree which I melted. I wanted to make the whole thing from scratch but realized that lockets are usually machine-made and I would be better off buying a pre-made locket and modifying it.
So I bit the bullet and bought a locket. I modified the clasp and bail. I made the frame of leaves and tree by hand. I made a few different leaf borders until I made one that I was happy with (in other words, until I made one that looked like it had leaves and not blobs that could be leaves). I also made a bunch of trees. The first few were weird-looking so I finally just printed a photo of the one I had originally bought (and unintentionally melted) and copied it (I literally traced it out on the silver copying all the lines and grooves…I know, not very original, but the alternative was my weird trees).
What did I learn from this project? Sometimes you just have to cut your losses and buy something pre-made. Sometimes you have to stop looking at projects like they’re big and scary: if you don’t start them, you won’t finish them. Sometimes you have to make things over and over again in order to realize what you should have done from the get go: practise makes perfect or close to it. Sometimes you just have to fake it til you make it!