THE Queen will be presented with one of her favorite types of jewellery in Cork today — a stunning hand-crafted silver brooch. Chris Carroll, who runs Cork Silver: Sean Carroll and Sons one of the city’s last remaining manufacturing silversmiths spent several months researching the project.
He said he finally decided on a brooch because of the Queen’s apparent love of this type of jewellery.
“I noticed that she always wears a brooch during her public appearances. This is a huge Honor. It doesn’t get much better than this,” he said.
The brooch, a model of Cork’s famous Butter Exchange building, is made of 42 individual handmade pieces. It has 18 carat gold mountings and is set with garnets and diamonds to represent the Cork colours.
Last week we had the honour of making the Freedom of the City of Cork casket which was presented to Peter Barry. This is the sixtenth casket we have made and have had the pleasure of meeting recipients such as Roy Keane, Mary McAleese, Michael Flately and Sonia O Sullivan. This solid silver casket is made entirely by hand. The main body has been planished (hammered with a polished head hammer this process smoothes out the metal and gives the final product a solid shape and finish) The piece is finished with a hand engraved inscription.
We’ve just finished this piece which was commissioned by a local scouts club as a presentation. For anyone who has been in the scouts you’ll recognise it’s a silver model of a woggle that you use to tie your scarf. It looks simply enough to plait some silver wire but the challenge was to get the silver to behave like the leather that is used in the original.
It took alot of annealing to get the silver wire malleable enough to plait, so what looks like three easy steps in these photos actually was spread out over a few days work!
The Finished Product
As Christmas is fast approaching we’ve been getting lots of commissions for silver tableware. Here are some pictures of a silver butter dish which Jimmy made.
The base of this dish has been made using a technique called spinning which is done on a lathe. This involves cutting a disk of silver and using a wooden chuck (which is the desired shape of the finished object) to shape the silver disk similiar to the way a wood turner works. The lid of the dish has been raised by hand which involves hammering the flat sheet of silver into its domed shape using stakes.( Click here to see what a stake looks like!)
Here are some photos of us working on silver medals which are to be presented to the Grand Slam team.
These silver medals are being presented by the Cork City Council and the Cork County Council on 13th May 2009. The medals are all cut by hand including the logos which are cut out by hand and then soldered on to the medal.
When the piece has been soldered and cleaned in acid they are then hand polished using a lathe.
They are then hand engraved on both sides to represent the County Council and the City Council.
The finished solid silver piece measures 50mm in diametre and is 2mm thick.
This piece is modelled on a Tootsie Roll ( really good sweets only available in America ..unfortunately!) The pendant is made up of a solid bar of silver which we brought down in size to match the diametre of the actual sweet. By pulling the bar through a draw plate you can slowly reduce the size or change the shape. We made two claw style settings to replicate the twist of the wrapper which we then set with cubic zirconias. This picture shows the piece when it had been soldered together before the setting, engraving and polishing.
unfinished soldered piece
In a fully equipped workshop like ours it is possible to make anything you want. Mostly customers come to us with ideas and we work with them on finalising the overall design. So it’s always interesting when you get an unusual request like this!
Finished pendant