Whiptips – recycling spoons
Whiptips – a crafts advice column for readers to ask questions or offer advice by leaving comments. View the Whiptips archive here. You can submit questions, to whiptips@gmail.com. Please include photos with your questions!
Alison writes in asking on how to make a spoon into a ring. I have occasionally seen beautiful old silver cutlery bent and shaped into chimes, pendants and all sort of wonderful things – anyone know how to do this?
I recently found a really cool spoon at a thrift store, and I’m dying to make it into a ring. I was wondering if you could do a little write up with this kind of theme. I don’t even know if I’m capable of making this or not, but a little story about spoon rings [and those cool coin rings] would be super cool!
keep up the good work, whipup is my favorite website!
I am not sure about the story, but perhaps readers could help out with suggested websites, online tutorials or cool artists to feature.
September 29th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Maybe this will help some:
http://warehouse.carlh.com/article_099/
found via
http://www.diyhappy.com/spoon-bracelet/
for more inspiration:
http://www.silverwork.com/page3.htm
and
http://www.silverspoonbracelets.com/
Good luck!
September 29th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
No idea about making a spoon into a ring, but there’s a great tutorial on how to make a coin ring here: http://homepage.mac.com/johnhuber/CoinRing/PhotoAlbum20.html
September 30th, 2006 at 12:16 am
First off, is it a small spoon? Because it seems (to me,) that a regular sized one might be too large for a ring…? Either way, a bracelet or ring shape would be made in mostly the same way.
To start, clean the spoon as much as possible. If you don’t have polish, sometimes a tiny dab of toothpaste can work well. Next, you’ll need a very hard surface (preferable an anvil, or something else you could hit with a hammer and not destroy.) If you don’t mind the marks a steel hammer will make, you could use a regular old one layng around, or (my preference,) a rawhide mallet, which won’t mark the surface of the spoon. Hammer to flatten out the spoon, and then you’ll need a round ring mandrel or rounded anvil to make the ring or bracelet (respectively,) round.
All it take to raise the 3d shape is more hammering, patience and observation. The more tiny taps, the better, if you really jack it out of shape you could potentially damage the inside structure of the metal, so you want to go slow. Good luck, I hope this helps! (When you make it, I’d love to see it finished!)
The longer spoon handle could be wrapped around several times to form a serpentine ring, or you could also cut the excess off, depending on your preference.
September 30th, 2006 at 1:31 am
ginger´s right about the technique, but make sure that the spoon is made from the same material inside & outside.
often old silver cutlery is made from two metals… a “hard” metal for the inside that then is covered with silver, so more people could afford a “real silver” cutlery.
hammering might make the upper layer crackle or even split off, so be very careful with that.
September 30th, 2006 at 1:53 am
yikes! Didn’t think about plating… Most of my experience is straight up sterling. Anybody know how to test for plating?
October 1st, 2006 at 3:39 am
Check out the hallmarks on the spoon before you start to determine it’s material – a mark like ‘EPNS’ will indicate electro-plated nickel silver….in which case, you would probably need to have the sppon re-plated after forming it. If the hallmarks indicate it is solid silver {’925′ – in the UK anyway..} you are in luck!! :)
Hope the project goes well!!