Stage 2: Spinning Top Pendant — One Step Closer to the End of Stage 2

This week I finished the Stage 2 spinning top pendant — a project built around doming, piercing, finishing, and assembly of a piece resembling a children's spinning top toy. It was also the fastest apprenticeship project I have completed so far.

The pendant is built from a set of nested brass components: two domes facing into each other, with a domed circular section between them. A twisted sterling silver wire runs through the centre and holds the whole assembly together. The top dome is pierced with a pattern of small cut-outs, giving it a flower-like shape with a scalloped edge. It has movement, it has a bit of playfulness, and it still feels like a properly made object.

The piercing was the part I expected to fight me, and it did indeed require care. Sawing into a small curved dome is not the same as sawing flat sheet. The surface moves away from you. The angles change. When a few of the smallest openings started to wander I did not try to force the saw back on course. I stopped, backed out, came in from a better angle, and left extra metal where I needed to. Once metal is gone, it is gone. Extra metal can still be filed, sanded, or cut away.

Finishing the spinning top pendant, one small surface at a time. Top left: thrumming the smallest pierced openings with reinforced emery strips to clean the inside edges where files cannot reach. Top right: the three brass components ready for assembly. Bottom left: the pierced top dome, with its scalloped, flower-like form. Bottom right: the completed pendant, held together by twisted sterling silver wire and finished as a small kinetic object from the bench.

The finishing took the usual patience. Some of the pierced sections were too tight for regular files, so I finished these by thrumming, a technique using thin strips of emery paper reinforced with tape, threaded through the openings and worked back and forth to clean the inside edges. It gets into places a file cannot reach.

The final assembly came down to the twisted sterling wire. One end had to be balled up carefully with the torch so it would act as a stopper and keep the pendant together. Too little heat and the ball would not form properly. Too much heat and the ball could grow too large or fall away completely. Since this was my last prepared piece of wire, ruining it would have meant going back to make more stock from scratch. So I practised first on a spare piece. Once I had the feel for the heat, I did it on the actual pendant. It worked.

That was probably the quiet lesson of the week: the speed was real, but it was not luck. Drilling, sawing, piercing, doming, workholding, finishing — these skills are starting to stack. Earlier projects made me work for every small gain. This week, some of those gains started showing up as momentum.

There was one serious jolt. While preparing silver for the next project, the snowflake pendant, I had a blowback during an ingot pour. A small amount of molten silver blew back out of the mould in hot droplets. My fire area, leather apron, gloves, long sleeves, and general setup did their job, but it was still a sharp reminder that when you work with molten metal near 1,000°C, safety in the studio is never something you finish setting up once and forget. Every incident deserves a review.

By the end of the week, the spinning top pendant was done, the wire for the snowflake pendant was drawn to size, and Stage 2 was down to its final project. That feels good. Not finished. Not yet. But close enough now that I can see the edge of it. The next piece is the snowflake pendant, and if that goes well, Stage 2 will be complete.

For now, I will take the win, clean the bench, and keep moving.

Back to the bench. For the next chapter, check in here next week—and follow along on Instagram @pinedaandco.