Jewelry Making Silver

© by Rena Klingenberg; all rights reserved

Jewelry making silver is often alloyed with other metals. Pure silver is a lustrous, white precious metal. It's soft and easily shaped, and is slightly harder than gold.

Handmade silver chain

Silver tarnishes quickly in an environment containing either ozone or hydrogen sulfide. You can slow the rate of tarnish by keeping it tightly sealed in a plastic bag.

Be sure to save all of your silver scraps that are too small to use in your jewelry. Some jewelry suppliers and metal mills accept scrap silver, which you can usually exchange for cash or credit toward future metal purchases.

Argentium (pronounced: ahr-JENT-ee-um) sterling silver contains 92.5% pure silver, plus some of the copper that makes up regular sterling silver. However, it also contains a third element - germanium.

The addition of germanium gives this new variety of jewelry making silver some desirable properties, including tarnish resistance and firescale elimination.

Argentium sterling silver tends to cost a bit more than the traditional sterling, but many jewelry artists feel the extra cost is worth it to reduce the constant headache of keeping their pieces tarnish-free.

Fine silver is at least 99.9% pure silver. It's softer and easier to shape than sterling silver, and slightly more costly. After silver metal clay is fired, it's fine silver.

A microscopically thin film of silver is applied over the surface of a base metal to give it the shine and appearance of silver. However, silver-plated items rarely appear as white and shiny as sterling or fine silver.

Also, the super-thin plated layer inevitably wears off, revealing the scabby or dull-looking base metal beneath.

An alloy of 92.5% pure silver plus 7.5% copper. It's harder than pure silver, but less white, and tarnishes more easily.

Sterling silver jewelry is sometimes given a "flashing" (thin coating) of fine silver or rhodium for extra shine and whiteness.

Jewelry artists sometimes oxidize or "antique" their finished sterling pieces to blacken the recessed areas, and then rub the rest of the piece to a high white shine. Oxidizing can give a piece of jewelry wonderful depth or a rustic feel.