I’ve been doing more work with designing and creating earrings and pendants made in semi-precious metals, particularly brass. The first item is a pendant, that I all “steampunk donut”, and the second item is a pair of earrings that I call “XOXO hoops”.

I used to think that I could just print things in plastic and then order up a metal version, but that doesn’t work well. For one thing, with earrings, I’ve discovered that some designs just won’t work because the design doesn’t have enough interconnected parts. The other important thing is weight. I have to keep the metal earrings very light or they’re just not wearable. This means I usually change the design to reduce it’s overall size as well as size of the “wires”. The smaller wire sizes tend to look “lost” in a plastic earring, but the brightness of metal makes it okay. Also, smaller wires in plastic are just too breakable, but that’s not a problem in metal. The good thing is that reducing the material volume also cuts down on the cost.