The brief for our seventh project for the course I’m doing this year was to create a piece using chenier hinge as a feature rather than a function.  (Chenier is hollow tubing, in case you weren’t sure!)

I designed this pendant so that it could be worn both horizontally and vertically.  The six plates rotate around a centre rod. There were a few challenging moments to my usual sadly limited patience during the construction of this piece. Titanium is an interesting but hard metal to work with.. physically hard rather than mentally!  It’s a dull grey colour, and very hard to cut, file and especially drill.  The gorgeous colour is achieved by heating very carefully, so it has to be riveted on rather than soldered.  I added the titanium mainly because I fell in love with the blue quartz bullet stones!!

Once in a while, my fellow students and I agree, you make something that has many challenging stages in it, and many learning experiences. By the end of the process you are pretty over it – so you pop the piece away for a while, and when eventually you bring it out once more, it usually is much more pleasing than you remember!  This is one of these pieces! 🙂