Entry tags:

tribal trainwrecking

tribal jewelry repair
Trying out a tribal jewelry repair tutorial thing . . . bear with me, guys. :D



Mah disclaimer, let me show it to you: Some people like their jewelry to be missing stones and to be corroded and to leave black marks behind when they wear it. I don’t. If you are dramatically offended by my cleaning & fixing this stuff up, please click here to air your grievances. I’ve also tried to do everything wrong that could be done wrong—okay, so it wasn’t intentionally trying—but I’ve also noted where things FUBARed, so if you FUBAR and want to rant then at least be sure you’ve done it in new and amazing ways. I'll be impressed, I promise. :D


For the rest of you:

Making new (plastic) stones for your jewelry:

It sucks when your awesome necklace or pendant is missing one or two or six stones. We can all stick little store-bought rhinestones into place, but what about those big funny-shaped or oddly-sized empty spots?

I’ve got two options. Both involve those little wonders from our childhood, pony beads. After all, pony beads come in a rainbow of colors, melt decently without stinking too much, and are both readily available and dirt cheap. That was more than enough reason for me to try them out.

Option 1 involves cleaning everything out of your pendant, sticking a bead or two in (on top of a piece of foil), and putting it in the oven at 450 degrees Fahrenheit (and watching it closely) for fifteen minutes to melt the bead directly into the setting. Note that when I say clean everything out of your pendant, I mean clean everything out of it. That wax/resin that holds the rest of your stones in? At best it’ll blacken your pendant and/or make your house smell like burning Christmas. At worst, your pendant might catch on fire. Boiling the icky out of pieces seems to solve this problem. The rest of your stones? They’re likely plastic and will melt into funny colors and shapes. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. The pretty green stone I thought was glass wrinkled and shriveled and wasn’t really pretty anymore by the time it came out of the oven. D:

If you’re willing to give this method a shot, it can lend to some interesting texture and depth to your jewelry. This one’s still in process, but the multi-tone blue stone is pretty permanently stuck there by the method above. (The heavily darkened parts are the result of my leaving wax in the settings.) But if your jewelry has gaps between the setting's back and bezel, you'll probably want to try option 2 rather than melt plastic all over everything.

Addendum: The little spots of different colors in this pic are from where I took a butcher knife and chopped a light blue opaque bead to bits. They cut all right but shoot everywhere, so I'd recommend draping a dish towel over the cutting board should you try cutting them up as well.

The little red stone in that picture is actually what started me on option 2. I pulled it out of another setting and ended up using a pair of scissors to make it fit this one. It cut more easily than I’d expected. And here a light bulb went off: Why have all this worry about melting things permanently into the pendants when I could make little pieces, cut them up, and stick them in from there?

Hence Option 2. Here’s how I did it.

First I covered a baking tray in aluminum foil, bright side up. I had a few variations of pony beads left over from my raver days, so I decided to be pseudoscientific here and melt them in their own little groups. Some were clear, some were glittery, some had a pearly coating, and some were opaque.

My tray setup:



I preheated the oven while I was busy sorting little beads. I saw someone featured on HGTV recommend baking beads at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for melting, but that’s not necessary when 450 will do. But before you do that, open your windows and turn on the fans! These things can be stinky! Also, I’m not sure how healthy it is to be around melty plastic in an unventilated area. If you have a spare toaster oven and/or are able to do this outside then by all means, do so. A couple commenters have also told me that melting these beads can leave plasticy particulates in your oven. How does this work safety-wise in relation to those little plastic "make your own stained glass" kits? Hell if I know—I'm just here for the shiny things.

So I put the beads in the oven, waited ten minutes, looked and saw some bead-forms still in the melted puddles, and left ‘em for five more. The end results look something like diagrams from a science class:







The opaque ones melted into a more evenly colored puddle (with the glittery ones close behind in evenness), though the pearly ones made a sorta neat pattern that shouldn’t be easily distinguishable once cut up and put into jewelry. Most of the colors didn’t change, except for the opaque ones which darkened a little on top. None went too wild and melted everywhere.

Now comes the fun part: sizing it.

If you have a grinding wheel or sander-drill-attachment, this is where you use it. (Masks are nice things to have at this point, though the plastic bits don't make nearly as much of a mess as ceramic ones.) Otherwise, get your scissors and know that you’re in for some swearing and missed shapes--and if you're unlucky, a sliced fingertip or two.

So I had this. I wanted it fixed.



Add in the jewelry cleaning method (below), a couple broken-off moderately-right-sized pieces, and a few minutes at the grinder wheel, and . . .



You’ll want to put foil under the clear stones to bring out the color. (Yes, I missed with the foil on the one side. Sometime during my fight to re-melt the wax, the foil got shifted and then the stone got stuck and then I whined about it on the internet.) A safe & easier bet here involved sizing the foil properly first, gluing it into the setting (yay, e6000!), then use more clear glue to stick the stones into the setting.

Other options:

Other people have mentioned the make-your-own-stained-glass kits, which are sold for cheap at craft stores & possibly Wal-mart. I haven't tried those and don't know where they rate on the melty-plastic safety scale. If you have, let me know and I'll link to you. :)

Myrrhdusa from Lj says she's also had luck revamping jewelry with fimo clay. Fimo comes in all sorts of neat, easily-moddable colors for a couple bucks a pack, and would be easily controllable if you're able to put the full piece of jewelry in the oven. Results aren't as shiny as plastic, but that's why we have sculpey glazes. Having recently tried this, though, I find the potential for underbaking/overbaking to be a bit of a pain in the butt.





Next!


Cleaning up dirty, corroded, &/or otherwise unhappy jewelry:

Like I said: This is what’s worked for me for pieces that have been really filthy and/or corroded beyond hope. If you have a finish or patina you want to keep on your jewelry, don't do this.

Get a decent-sized ceramic bowl (metal bowls turn metal pieces funny colors),and add about two cups of steaming hot water, a three-finger pinch of salt, a piece of foil, equal amounts of vinegar & dish soap (about a tablespoon each), and the piece of jewelry that needs work. This’ll probably smell like vinegary butt. I’ve also thrown some baking soda in once which made it smell even worse, but I don’t think that affected anything enough to warrant permanently adding it to the mix. From there, get an old toothbrush and start scrubbing.

Be sure to pull the jewelry out every so often to check on its progress! I’ve put too much vinegar in a solution like this once and had it start to eat silver plating off of a corroded dangle. Vinegar + silver isn’t good, though, so if you suspect your piece has a high silver content it might be best to leave the vinegar out entirely.

Did I note that this mix isn't really for fine jewelry or good as an everyday cleaner? I'm told that all the ingredients can adversely affect silver, though the vast majority of kuchi jewelry isn't silver but gillet.

If you have an especially corroded spot, ball up your piece of foil and scrub with that instead of the toothbrush. It’s stronger than bristles but not as hardcore as steel wool, and might help with whatever terrible chemical reaction is going on in the bowl. (Don’t go too nuts with the foil if your piece is metal-plated instead of straight gillet, though—this could take the plating off and make me start a n00b’s guide to electroplating. In my experience, it’s the bright silvery pieces that’ve been plated—and even then, the normal rinse & toothbrush scrub hasn’t visibly aversely affected them. Just too much vinegar for too long.)

Keep scrubbing. Heavily corroded things might take a while. Remember that green corrosion is decay and can eat into & destroy your jewelry.

Don’t think you’ve seen enough progress and it’s been a few minutes? Pour your water out. Look at its color. Eeewwww.

My progress is as follows:

The pendant as I got it:



Just into the bath:



Mid-scrubbing:



Once I got sick of scrubbing, a couple minutes later. I got more ick out of the crevices & corners, and took more of the black stuff off.



There’s still a little bit of darkness where the green was, but I’m okay with that. If I decide I’m not, I’ll just start over again. At least it's not green. Another pendant I've refurbished with this method can be seen here. I wish I'd gotten pictures of its "before" state—this one was a green wreck!

If all else fails and you still have some stubborn green ick, there's a few last resort options. I've recently had luck dunking a heavily corroded cheap metal piece directly in lime scale remover, rinsing it well, then scraping the remains of the green gunk off with a thumbtack. This seems to work well with those big shield rings--plus if the item is solid metal, a few tries won't kill the piece. But if a chemical bath isn't your thing, there's always this:



This dremel head will take just about anything off—including caked-on corrosion and the black mess from when I almost set the pendant up top on fire. Just remember that it’ll also take off the top layer of metal and might leave little scuff marks behind. It also isn't too great when it comes to tiny crevices.


Other options:
Ursula from tribe.net says she's had Simple Green cleaner take black tarnish off kuchi jewelry, and Shari from tribe.net has mentioned the cleaner Simichrome, which can be found at hardware & auto stores & will let you buff jewelry pieces clean without taking the patina out of crevices. Also: A drop of oil, rubbed onto the piece, will help keep the green from coming back or really getting there to begin with. (An ounce of prevention and such.)


Questions, comments, trepidations, did I miss anything?

ETA: Sorry to anyone who might've commented, but the spammy anon comments are getting on my nerves. Until I decide whether or not I want to nuke all anon commenting, I'm just gonna turn comments on this post off.