Plique a jour earrings-progress pics

At this point, the settings for the tops of the earrings are done. One pair is pierced, and the other is in progress. 

Once the cells are cut and finished, I’ll move on to the enameling. 

Here’s a time-lapse video of sawing just 7 cells. Each individual earring takes about 1-1.5 hours. I use 3/0 blades for 18 gauge fine silver sheet. The sawnlade is released from one end of the frame, fed through the drilled hole and then re-inserted into the frame. Then the cell can be sawn out from the inside. All of the tiny scrap pieces of silver will be collected and refined into new materials like sheet and wire. 

There were 150 cells for this set of earrings! The clean up that I’ll do next will involve threading the saw blade back into each cell, and with very light horizontal pressure I’ll “file” the inside edges with the saw blade. This will help smooth out any rough edges or sport where the blade slipped the first time through. It’s very important to keep the saw blade perfectly perpendicular here, or there could be issues later while enameling.