Adventures in Metal Stamping

I have been looking to add some more metal work techniques to my designs to try and add more individuality to my pieces. The catch is that I do not have a jewelers bench or access to a space where I can do any soldering and that kind of work so it has to be something that I can do in my apartment.

After doing a couple of jewelry metal courses and looking around online I discovered metal stamping. This technique only requires a few tools, is not messy or take up much space and you can buy cute little design stamps like leaves, flowers and hearts! All this makes it just the perfect introduction for me to add some metal work to my pieces.

The first thing I decided I wanted to do was to try and make small sterling silver tags with an "L" for luli to put on the back of my necklace chains to create more of a brand for my work. I went to Lee Valley tools and bought two sizes of letters and number stamps and bought sterling silver tags from my wholesale supplier, Bamiyan Silver.

The only advice I had at this point was from the guy at Lee Valley tools who said that a regular hammer would work just fine to tap the steel stamp to get the imprint. I went home and looked around for the best place to start off, I often work on the floor so I pulled out a piece of wood I have in the closet that I sometimes use to work on. The piece of wood use to be a very cheap pine Ikea shelf.

I thought I would just go for it and and hammered the steel stamp into the thin piece of silver. The result was less than satisfactory. The sides of the metal curved and the letter was surrounded by a circle because the stamp had sunk into the soft pine. My next thought was to look around my apartment for something harder to work on...my floors are solid wood parkey, this should be perfect as it is so much harder than the pine that I had already tried working on...do not try this at home, I have a permanent tiny "L" somewhere on my wood floors. This was clearly not the way to do it. At this point I decided I needed some help and I decided to buy an ebook about stamping. I bought it from a great seller www.tfakler.etsy.com.

Her ebook was super helpful and I thought that I had enough knowledge to have another go. This time I had so much more success with the letter stamps and I was able to get a well centered clear "L" on the tag.

Next, it was time to tackle the cute design stamps but I decided to practice on a 24 gauge sheet of copper which is much cheaper than sterling. These stamps are a whole lesson within themselves! The design stamps are not as deep as the letter stamps therefore you have to hit them a lot harder (I hit my thumb with the hammer a couple of times ouch!). I ended up using a mallet to hit the design stamps as there is more area and more weight so you are less likely to slip and do not have to use as much force to hit the stamp. By the time I was ready to be done for the day, I still had no where near mastered using the design stamps. It was really difficult to get even pressure on the wider stamps so there was often part of the design missing and it was hard to line the stamp up just right.

I have by no means given up on the design stamps and I will be trying out whole words with the letter stamps soon (wish me luck!). My lesson learned is that this is one of those things that looks so much easier than it really is, practice is key and getting knowledge from someone else before you start is so important!

Here is a list of the tools that you need to get started:

• steel block
• rubber block
• chasing hammer
• 600 grit sandpaper
• polishing clothes
• metal hole punch
• steel letter and/or design stamps
• sheet metal or shapes
  

Happy stamping!