Remembering Poppy

Growing up, I had this amazing friend named Poppy Shapiro. She was funny and irreverent and incredibly creative. We spent hours making up satiric ads for Esprit clothes, fake magazines, and ridiculous stories. She went to a private school for the theatrically and artistically inclined, and sadly we fell out of touch for a while. Happily, we reconnected as adults. And she was the same – fun, funny, irreverent, and wildly artistic (rather like her mom). She had her own cleaning business, worked as a tattoo artist (with a lot of very devoted clients) and painted wonderful pictures.

We lost Poppy to an enlarged heart on New Year’s eve this year – and it was a huge, huge loss for me and for all her knew her. To keep her with me a little more, I decided to make a pendant in her honor. Since many people ask me how I do this process, I photographed it (as best as a girl can while holding a flaming torch). I originally posted this on Facebook, January 10, 2011. 

Here it is.

First, I went to Google image to get some templates. No, not actually poppy jewelry pendants, but pictures of poppies and poppy leaves. 

Here is the poppy image that I chose. I picked it not so much to copy as to clearly see the anatomy of the flower. It has six petals.

I then drew my own design on paper, which I can then trace onto the metal.

I did the same for the bale, which I want to look like a poppy leaf. Here's a good picture.

And my design.

After cutting out my poppy design, I traced the pattern onto the metal with a Sharpie (or as my Dad calls them, “Rare Pens”) and then cut it out using a jeweler's saw. It looks like a hack saw on a long handle, but little and dainty.

After cutting out the shape, it is necessary to heat the metal with the torch to relax the metal. This loosens the bonds a bit and allows you to bend the metal. 

Next I shape the poppy using a dap and a dapper’s block. The dap is the round metal thing. The block has a series of deeper indentations and I put the metal in the shallowest, and tap it into shape using a hammer and a dap.

Then I move to deeper indents until I get the shape I want.

After sawing, the edges of the metal are rough. So now that I’ve banged it around a bit and gotten the shape I want, I smooth out the rough edges with a file and then sand paper. You start with a rough grit sand paper – about 220 grit and work down to smoother and smoother grits. 

Then I sand between the petals with a tiny sanding disk that is mounted on my flex(ible) shaft. Yes, it is the very same thing you see at the dentist’s to hold the drill. In fact, a lot of dentists make jewelry on the side. I think this is a much more pleasant use for this apparatus.

Then I polish up the metal using increasingly fine rubber sanding sheets (like sandpaper, but more supple).

The next step is to make the flower stamen. I’m going to do this by making little tiny metal balls and soldering them to the center of the flower. To start, I cut out bits of wire to form the balls. I try really, really hard to make them the same exact length so that they’ll become same-size balls.

I then place the bits of wire onto a charcoal block for melting.

When you really heat the metal, it will melt and ball up.

It has to get red hot for this to work. I circle the flame to make the metal spin so it forms a nice ball.

There it is.

And here's a whole bunch of them. Then I pickle them (an acidic bath to clean off all the char, oxidization and yuckiness) followed by a rinse.

To attach them, I paint them with “flux” (basically borax), which prevents the metal from burning and oxidizing and placing them where I want them to attach. I then put little chips of silver solder (these are bits of silver that, because of what’s combined with it have lower melting points than sterling silver) among the balls. When I heat it, the solder will melt and function as a glue to bond the balls to the flower.

To make the bale, I curled the end of a wire with round nose pliers and then hammered the tail flat.

I marked the edges of the hammered bale so that I can saw it into a leaf shape, based on the image I originally made.

There are several ways to solder metal. The key is that the metal makes very good contact. For something like a ring you would put the solder at the bottom of the seam and let the molten metal ooze up into it using capillary action. In this case, where I’m doing a “large” flat surface against another flat surface, I use a technique called sweat soldering. Basically I melt some solder chips onto the surface of the bale. This gives a nice layer of solder that will melt across the surface.

Then I flip it over and press it firmly against the back of the poppy so it makes good contact. I'm using solder with a lower melting point than the stuff I used for the little balls, so that the balls won't loosen under the heat. The white stuff is the flux I mentioned before, the solution that helps reduce oxidation (the icky black stuff).

Then I pickle it to get it clean.

And polish it up with a series of sand papers and silicone sanding disks, followed by an hour or so in a tumbler. The tumbler contains little steel pins and nuggets that crash against the metal and smooth it out, kind of the way the sand and salt in the ocean smooth out beach glass.

Once it's nicely polished, the last step is to paint the middle part with liver of sulphur. This will cause the metal to oxidize and turn black - like the center of a real poppy.

And here it is!