Flames Necklace

What goes better than wood and flame? How about wooden flames plus pearls? :)

Here’s my entry for the January contest. I made this necklace with 27 pieces of Padouk, Spalted Maple, Curly Maple, Osage Orange, Black Walnut, Tulipwood, Brazilian Rosewood and Ebony. I cut each one on the scroll saw (after making a sample version in poplar – thank you cheap wood from HD!) and burred out recesses so that my baroque pearls can nestle down into the padouk flames. It took awhile, but each one sits down in. Here’s (I hope!) what it looked like at that stage.




and fitting the pearls

Next up I used my flex shaft with a tiny drill-press attachment to drill all the holes for the neck wire to go through. With such thin pieces, I find I have to drill with up to 10 different size bits getting bigger and bigger so I don’t split the woods.



I used ball burrs and a lot of hand sanding to texture each flame and then it was on to finishing. Each piece has two coats of Sealcoat and two coats of spar varnish to help with UV protection. That turned out to make things so sparkly that lots of folks think it’s made of pottery rather than wood! Here are the pieces drying.



Something I learned: after painstakingly shaping each one so that it fit perfectly against it’s neighbors lying flat on the board you see in the photo, I then put a neckwire through it and found I had to reshape each one again so it fit perfectly when draped against the neck! Looks seamless now, but next time I’ll DEFINITELY plan on that beforehand.

With everything fitting nicely, I cut lengths of sterling silver tubing, shaped each one to fit perfectly in the holes (had to make sure they weren’t too wide or they pushed the other flames out of flush) and epoxied them in place.

Finally I drilled into the backside of the pearls and installed 2-3 silver posts in each, like you’d have in pearl earrings. The posts extended out and fit into matching holes I drilled in the recesses in the padouk.

Put everything on my fabricated sterling silver neck wire and done! Took about 50 hours, but well worth it!

Thanks to my co-worker Elise for modeling and Doug Yaple for the awesome full necklace photo. Hope you all like it!

-- www.aaronbarr.com