Jewellery Elective

Experimentation with plastic acrylic

The brief for jewellery elective was based on body adornment. I thought about researching into recycled jewellery as i thought it would be interesting to recycle and recreating something exciting as a body adornment piece.

Below is a picture of leftover acrylic cutouts, which i found in a box in the workshop. There was a couple of sheets of this cut out acrylic, which was useful as i could experiment creating a range of samples.

These pictures show one of my experimentations i did by cutting out a piece of acrylic and then lacing it in the heated oven for 5-10 mins. I then took it out of the oven and then bent it into shape by holding it for a couple of seconds, until the acrylic went hard and  held its shape i molded it into. By beding the acrylic enable me to think of ways i could transform this plastic either as a piece of a necklace or a hand piece of jewellery.

 Experimenting with cut out acrylic

For my next experimentation i decided to cut out pieces of acrylic from the cut out acrylic sheets and then drilled small holes a number of times on all the 6 pieces i cut out. I drilled a number of holes onto the acrylic as i wanted to attach the acrylic pieces together somehow using string or jump rings. 

These pictures show a necklace sample using some of the pieces of cut out and drilled acrylic. I used string which i tied up in knots on boths ends of the drilled holes to go around the neck. To hold the rest of the necklace together i made copper jump rings, which i then placed through the drilled holes and attached a number of jump rings together to create an enlarged hanging pendant for a neck piece sample.

Experimenting to create final piece

For this sample i was experimenting with the type of metal to use to make jump rings i decided to use brass jump rings as it went better with the blue acrylic. I cut up more acrylic pieces and then drilled a number of holes on each of the cut out pieces and then sanded down the sharp edges. I made a range of chains in order to join the acrylic pieces together by attaching them together through the drilled holes.

 For the back design i thought about having one large acrylic piece that had two drilled holes and the top and two drilled holes at the bottom. As the front chain is connected to the two back neck holes, the chain hanging at the back was going to be hanging down while connected to the bottom hole on the other side.

By creating some samples enable me to decide which method was the best to construct a necklace together and the best materials to use that would be stable enough to hold the necklace together without it falling apart.