High Heel Shoe Pendant With Garnet Cabochon

As a hobbyist silversmith I've been asked to come up with an unusual pendant for a birthday of my friend's sister. The only thing I knew about the birthday girl was that she is a long time salsa dancer.

Somehow in my brain salsa dance is firmly connected with high heel dance shoes so this is what decided to try. This is where I started the journey of handcrafting a strappy high heel shoe silver pendant with a garnet cabochon.

Jewellery has been my hobby for quite some time now, so I already have most of the necessary tools for this project.

Tools I used:

• Jewellers saw
• Set of files
• Different pliers
• Dremel Micro 8050 cordless engraver
• Dremel burrs and polishing wheels
• Propane torch
• Soldering flux
• Medium/soft silver solder
• Heat-resistant soldering block
• Steel punches S and L
• Flat screwdriver
• Tweezers
• Candle-heated jar with citric acid
• Permanent marker

Materials:

• 1mm sterling silver plate
• 0.4x1.4mm sterling silver flat wire
• 7mm Round garnet cabochon
• ~1g of silver scraps
• Gypsum powder
• Candle wax
• Polymorph plastic

As any other of my projects I start with a basic shape. In this case the basic shape is a shoe sole. In order to get the most realistic result I outlined a sole of real high heeled sandal (belongs to my wife). Not being sure about the right scale of a future pendant I placed few outlines beside each other to compare. It seemed that number 5 would be good enough to proceed.

Next step is to print out, cut out and glue the paper sole to a silver plate. I have a nice 1mm thick silver stripe, which seems to be perfect for this project. With a good jeweller saw cutting a sole is pretty straightforward. But be prepared to replace a saw blade or two during the process. Once the shape is cut I use a flat file to smooth the edges of the sole.

Another trick here is to grind off the edge on a lower sole surface. I guess in engineering terms it is called fillet or chamfer. Also at this point I use my steel punches to stamp my logo on the bottom of the sole. Once I'm happy with the sole shape it is ready for the main bending to start looking like a high heel shoe. I use a pair of soft jaws pliers to protect the surface from scratches.

Here comes the fun part – making a heel. The difficulty here is that the heel is geometrically very complex object, which cannot be easily produced by basic operations like bending, flattening or sawing. I decided to use simple moulding method for the heel. Silver moulding is not easy to master at home, but there are shortcuts. I took a piece of candle wax, warmed it up in my hands and modelled a heel directly onto the sole.

After few iterations of the wax heel it finally looked good enough. So it was the time to make a mould. I used a common gypsum powder, the one you could find in any home appliance store. When the mixture was getting a sour creme consistency I stick the sole with wax heel right inside the gypsum cast. I gave it a day to dry and harden and then I heated it up with a blow torch, let the wax out and poured melted silver into the cavity.

Even though the result was not perfect, the heel shape was good enough to go forward. I spent some time using my Dremel Micro grinding the ugly raw heel into a shape I'm happy about.

I have a sole and a more or less good looking heel, so it is time to connect them together. In order to keep both parts firmly in place I used some steel wire to tie them up. It worked actually very well, apart from a small bit of steel wire that I had to grind of after the soldering. To solder the sole and heel I used medium solder with a lot of flux because of the contact area is relatively large.

The thing I got as a result of this step I call a slipper, which is basically a shoe base with no decoration on it.

Time to add some decoration to my high heel slipper. First I modelled a tiny leg out of the same wax I used for a heel before and attached it to the slipper. Then I cut flat silver wire into pieces to form the show straps. I also created a round cast for the garnet stone using the same wire. Since I didn't have a sketch for the shoe I bent each strap and fit it to the shoe with a wax leg on and marked attachment points with a permanent marker.

After some time playing around with it I got all straps ready to be attached to the slipper. I intentionally cut the straps with a little excess wire to make it easier for soldering. So first I removed the wax leg, cleaned up the surfaces and started to solder straps one by one to the attachment points I made earlier.

Once all the soldering is done the silver does not look great due to all the burnt residue. In order to fix it I prepare a hot bath with concentrated citric acid and put the shoe in it. Heated acid works as a dissolver for all that unwanted residue stuck on the silver surface. After an hour or so the shoe came out from the acid bath pretty clean, but still requiring polishing.

So all the silver parts of the shoe are soldered and cleaned up in the acid bath. Before the stone gets in I use again my Dremel engraver with a soft wire brush to preliminary polish all the surfaces. This activity reveals places with excessive solder, so it is the right time to grind them off. I have a few silicon brushes with different grit to do such delicate grinding and final surface polishing.

And here comes the final challenge. Setting stone in a bezel turned out be an extremely difficult process. My fellow goldsmith (a professional one) advised me to wrap the entire piece in hot sealing wax – the substance once used to seal royal correspondence. With no good quality wax in hand I decided to improvise and use a polymorph plastic. It actually worked quite well firmly holding all the delicate pieces intact while letting me put it into the vice.

In the absence of an impact engraver (I hope to have one someday) I managed the whole stone setting process with a small flat screwdriver and a hammer. The method is actually very simple - you have to bend the edges of the bezel from the opposite sides and do it around the entire circumference of the bezel.

One last bit is adding a bail to the shoe to be able to actually use it as a pendant. I made the strap at the back of the shoe significantly longer exactly for this reason. So I just rolled it in a loop and put there a simple jump ring made out of a piece of sterling silver 0.8mm wire. This bail is large enough to fit a delicate silver chain right through it.

Thank you for reading through my first ever instructable - I sincerely hope you liked it!

If you did like it I welcome you to leave me a comment below and also check my jewellery blog: www.slavik.ltd.