[Chambre de Verre] Silver Set with Glass [Private]

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

The Fifth Cycle of Kalendryas
in the Season of Winter

Iseult smoothed the paper out in front of her carefully, her fingers pressing down the corners and avoiding the charcoal drawing done by the clerk back in the front room. She had just left the customer behind her and had the time to spare to sit down and work over the piece--many pieces were being redirected to other people since she had given her notice a few brightenings earlier.

She sat down and began her plan. Create the silver pieces first, then fix the glass onto them when the glass was still malleable, but had taken its complete shape. The glass earrings would be easiest, not because the flowers were easy, but rather because the silver tower that the man wanted...that would be the tricky thing.

So. glass earrings first. Then the odd silver tower with its large glass orb on top.

She wrote her little 'notes to self' in the corner and sat back. She had the drawings in her hands, so might as well get started on the silver wiring for the earrings.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Iseult picked up a spool of silver wire and set it down beside her. She had with her a pair of her diamond shears, one of the ones she used to cut the thick strands of glass she worked. They would work well enough for this as well. She drew on the page a quick glance of what she wanted; the clerk had only drawn the roses. The silver of the earring would be a carefully curved hook with a thick section near its straight base that could be set into the heavy glass without fear of loosing the precious rose.

She set aside the charcoal and the parchment and took the spool of silver into her hands. She loosened the end of the silver wire from the spool and carefully unraveled it from its place. She measured out the wire by sight rather than actual measurement. To be safe, she cut more than was probably necessary and then set the silver wire to the side again.

To give the wire its shape, she picked up a pair of smooth pliers. Too much of a twist with her wrist and the wire would bend too sharply. Not that it couldn't be fixed, but the less play with the wire, the better. She did not want it to snap or turn a foul shape that could not be fixed.

She used her small finger as a curving guide, being very mindful of how close the nose of the pliers came to her skin. She nipped the skin once and winced, but refrained from flailing her bitten hand and dropping the project. She clung onto them instead and bent over it, using the plier to guide the silver wire around the curve of her pinky.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Once the basic curve of the earring was set, Iseult shifted her fingers down the length of the silver wiring and focused on giving one end of the wire a more abrupt end. She set the pliers around the wire and slowly altered its positioning so that it bent outward. A slight bend. Nothing more than that.

She set down the pliers and held the silver wire up, her arm supported by setting her elbow on the edge of the table. Her eyes squinted at the piece and she held it closer. There, better. So far it seemed all right. A little crooked maybe... She fixed that quickly enough, holding it up after each careful manipulation of the pliers until she found herself satisfied with its appearance so far.

The remainder of the hook needed to be curled at the end. Using the very tip of the pliers' mouth, she began to bend the other end of the hook with slow, careful twists of her wrists. It was somewhat hard holding onto the silver wiring and twisting it around, but having handled small pieces of glass, it was not incredibly tasking on her wrist and her focus to twist it just right.

It spiraled, at first loosely, but Iseult was focused on getting it to tighten and bunch together. She used the pliers and occasionally the gentle force of her fingers to make sure the spiral was an unmovable part of the wire hook. Once she was content with what she had wrought, she guided the remaining wire into a knot just beneath the spiral and cut the rest of off.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Iseult repeated the same process with the other hook. This was a little more tedious and time-consuming since she felt she had stop every now and again to compare the one to the other to make sure that it was not too big on one end or too curved or set than the other. She was glad enough when the basic shaping of both hooks were done and, for a moment, Iseult wished she had worked on the curve of both at the same time--it might have been possible and would have saved her a little bit of time.

But done was done and Iseult cut off the excess wire and put the pliers aside.

She carried the completed hooks over to the bench and sat them down beside her. She had considered, briefly, lampworking the pair of rose earrings, but she had never found herself fully comfortable with the technique. Better, she thought, to stick with what was comfortable for the time-being and experiment on her own with what did not make her entirely comfortable. So she would craft the rose figurines at her bench, with the materials and tools that best suited her.

She picked up a punty, a small one than those she used for the bigger vases she often crafted, and propped open the furnace doors. Sticking the end into the hot glass within, she twisted it and then lifted it out to inspect the globule she had gathered. Somewhat larger than she would need, but that was fine. Far better than too little.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Rolling the glass into the green powders, Iseult reheated the piece, letting glass and color fuse, and then sat down at the bench. The stem would be the easy part and she demonstrated this quickly enough by using the end of the tweezers to pull a strand of glass from the lump she had gathered. The stem would remove smooth, free of any thorns or other adornments.

So she worked on rolling the stem across the marver, using her thick gloved hand as a guide so that it didn't flop like some dying snake. Satisfied, Iseult picked up one of the wires and held it just below the dangling snake. It wasn't long. Perhaps a trace more than one inch. She set the cooling glass against wire and carefully maneuvered the wire so that the green glass wrapped itself around the wire. Once that was set, she used her shears to clip it off, giving it a slight angle--as if the rose stem had been cut from a bush.

After setting the wire in the garage, she repeated the process, but not before reheating the glass in the furnace. She pulled out the glass and rolled it on the marver carefully before dangling the glass around the wire, trapping it into a green snake around silver.

She cut the glass free from the lump that remained on the punty and placed it into the garage alongside the other one. That was finished, at least. Now time for the blossoms themselves...

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

To start the rose, cleaned off the glass from the punty and gathered more from the furnace. She added the coloring first, rolling the gathered glass in the powders that would result in a red tinting, and then reheated the piece before finally taking a seat at the bench. Here it was not so important to smooth out the glass as much as it might have been for a vase or a bowl that required smooth, even sides. Here she would simply use her jacks and tweezers to tease the glass into a petaled rose.

Iseult started first with the jacks, using them to separate out the portion of the glass that would be the rose. It was little bigger than a marble and stood like a head on some funny-looking doll. She twisted in her hands as she lowered her tweezers down to the mass. She tugged at a portion of the glass and watched as it eased away from the molten lump. She held the punty steady and eased her tweezers along the length of the lump, lifting that small portion she had teased out to create a ribbon of it. A line of a petal.

She had to reheat the glass before she could sit down and create another. She twisted the glass and focused on the side next to the first petal and, a little bit above where the first petal ended, she began a second petal, and this one took form, too, with a slight wave to it--no stiff rose here.

She repeated this around and around the rose, moving in a spiral as she created the layers of petals, giving them a curve as she settled them into place. The interior of the rose was hardest, but she worked from the inside to the outer petals as to not disturb them as she pulled them into being. When she was done, she retrieved the wire and stem from the garage and carefully began to maneuver the materials so that the base of the rose consumed the spiral of the wire, connecting with the green of the stem. She would add a leaf or two on last, to hide a bit of the connection area, but for now it was done and she set it back into the garage before returning to the furnace to start the second flower.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

The second flower was fashioned in the same way, petal after petal maneuvered into the red glass until they were all present and looking as much of a flower as Iseult could create. As with the last one, she removed the wire and stem from the garage and carefully combined them before setting it back in with the other.

She cleaned her punty again, using her tools carefully to pry the glass off and into a tray that would later be taken by an apprentice to be crushed down into frit. With the punty clean, she gathered more glass at its tip and rolled it in the same green powder she had used for the stem.

The leaf started out as the rose had--with her taking a seat at the bench without smoothing it out. One leaf per rose, she had decided, not wanting it to appear gaudy. She used the tweezers and the shears to clip and cut the glass into a tear-drop shaped ornament. She gave it a slight curl at its tip. It wasn't a large leaf, but decent enough in its size.

She carried it over to the garage and took out one of the near-finished earrings. It took some care to wrap the base of the leaf where the stem and rose met, but eventually she had it, the glass smoothed at the joints. The glass was then set in the annealer and Iseult proceeded to repeat the process with the remainder of the glass on the punty until both silver wire earrings were finished and set aside to cool gradually.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

The second thing to create was the large glass orb and its silver tower. She would need thicker wire, certainly, but the globe she could work on quickly, without any trouble at all; she had, after all, tons of practice with globes at this point, considering the business Straylor had somehow managed to talk her into.

She set the cleaned punty off to the side and picked up a blowpipe. She made sure she was situated and prepared to work on the globe, putting out on the bench a rounded mold that would help preserve the perfect roundness. With that out, Iseult dipped the punty into the furnace and gathered more glass. She dipped the glass in the blue powders and reheated it before she began to smooth the gathered glass over the marver in long, smooth sweeps of the pipe.

She gathered more glass and repeated the process before she angled the blowpipe over the arms of the bench and, rotating the pipe, her mouth at one end, she blew air through it. The piece expanded gradually and she paused to reheat it before coming back and blowing more air into the piece.

At this point she began to shape what she had expanded by using the mold. She called over one of the apprentices and they held the rounded indentation for her as she rolled the pipe into it. The damp wood helped to cool the edges slightly and back and forth she moved between the mold and the furnace, occasionally adding more air down the pipe until the globe had become a size close enough to what the man had described. The size of two fists. All right. A weird description, but decent enough.

She clipped the globe off the blowpipe and carefully handed it into the annealer. It needed no other shaping than what she had already given it. Simple enough, that was done. Now all that remained was the silver wire tower upon which the globe would perch.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

The following brightening Iseult brought out the pieces from the annealer and laid them out in front of her, careful with the globe so that it didn't go rolling off the edge and shatter across the floor. The earrings she dangled in front of her. The roses were small, but not petite. She held them to her ears and instructed one of the apprentices to fetch a glass. She looked at herself in the mirror and hoped they would not be too overbearing. She considered it and thought not.

She put it down and picked up the globe. The area where the globe had been removed from the blowpipe would need to be sanded, otherwise it was well rounded. It should have been. How many times had she made globes now? Far too many to keep track.

She gave the mirror back to the apprentice and told them also to take the earrings and put them in a nice box for the customer.

With the apprentice gone, Iseult approached the supply of silver kept by the glassworks. It was not much and had, indeed, to be purchased largely for this project, since they did not handle a lot of silver requests. She shifted her way through the silver selection and plucked up a thick silver wire that would require some hammering to spiral into its tower form, but nothing so dramatic as if she'd been using silvers sheets. She'd need two wires, one bracing the tower on one side, the other on the otherside. Otherwise the orb might overbalance one way or another and teeter over, smashing to the ground. Not a good prospect.

The wire selected, Iseult cut both lengths nearly four feet in length. Too long, she figured. She hoped. As she'd done with the earrings, more wire was preferable in comparison to too little.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Iseult set aside one long length of wire and set the other in front of her. She had in her hands the rawhide hammer, which was softer and less likely to make unnecessary marks and dents in the metal she was working with. She moved the wire in front of her, trying to determine how best to strike it. Where to start.

Well, she needed the wire to support the globe, which was not very heavy but still required sturdy footing. So she lifted the hammer and set about creating the 'foot' in the first wire. The hammer fell briskly against the silver, flattening it slightly even as she angled it against the edge of the table to give it that abrupt 'L' shape for the foot. She only used the hammer for this shaping of the metal and from there set it aside and began to use the pliers to guide the metal into a gradual spiral. One foot high, the man had wanted it.

As the worked the metal, she asked one of the apprentices to find a measuring stick. She paused now and again to glance over at the stick. Round and round the silver went, taking shape under the careful, slow guidance of the pliers, until she reached the mark that the apprentice's fingers rested at. One foot tall.

She then guided the wire into a circle at the top, using the globe--held by the apprentice--as a reference as to how wide it would need to be to support the orb. She curled the wire around itself when the circle met wire again, ensuring that it was comfortably in place, but not before clipping off the excess wire.

[Iseult Fluersdotter]

Iseult began on the last wire. She repeated the process, hammering out the base and shaping it into a sharp angle by leaning the wire against the edge of the table as she hammered at it. Moving the hammer back to the table, replacing it for the pliers, she used the first silver wiring as a guide this time around, using the help of an apprentice to keep it steady as she gradually wound the second silver wire through the first.

It was a little trickier than she had imagined it would be, but they came together, curved sides occasionally touched curved sides. One it got close to the top, Iseult gestured away the apprentice, feeling more confident with the piece's sturdiness, and clipped away much of the excess material, then curved the remainder of the metal into place, looping it carefully around the silver wire circlet at the top.

She stood back and studied it. It was on the ground and she'd been working occasionally at her knees, sometimes bent over it. It had been too high for her on the table. Just too awkward. She lifted it now and set it on the table, standing back. Her nose wrinkled a bit as she criticized her own work. She was not the master that Felicienne was. But that stood to reason. She was new at this thing called silver.

"Bring me that globe there," she instructed the apprentice and he lifted it from the table, wordlessly handing it to her. She held her breath a little as she placed the glass on top of the metal structure. Her fingers hovered around it and she stepped back, waiting for it to fall and shatter. But it held. Remarkably.

She sighed relief and nodded towards the apprentice. "This belongs with the earrings. They got to the same man. Ceniel."

She watched him take the piece away with him, a little wary, but knowing that he knew the importance of carrying glass so that it did not fall and shatter.

That project done, Iseult turned to something else.

[Heartbreaker]

OOC:1 point experience silversmithing
1 point experience glassblowing