Riveting Ideas

Now that the latest issue of The Polymer Arts is wrapped up and either in hand or on the way to our many excited readers, we get to look back at what went into this issue and show off a few more items and ideas that we couldn’t squeeze in.

For me, one of the really, really exciting sections of this issue was delving into cold connections and visiting some rather traditional jewelry techniques, but with polymer in mind. This was especially fun for me because I had the opportunity to revisit some techniques that had kind of dropped off my studio table, so to speak, the last few years. Back in art school, I was taught jewelry making and metalsmithing from a traditional perspective, so when I started exploring ways to combine metals with polymer, I found myself returning to some of those traditional techniques, primarily rivets and eyelets.

Using metal-centric techniques with polymer can be a little tricky, but new tools and smart approaches have made it really accessible to anyone with a few basic jewelry tools. In this issue we got to hit all the basics so that any of our readers could easily learn to rivet and add eyelets to polymer work. It gave me a chance to complete some tests and explorations, which forced me into the studio for several long days (I was not suffering mind you!) To my delight, with a little tweaking and careful testing, I was able to put together a series of tutorials with super-easy ways to rivet with polymer, as well as sneaking in some simple handcrafted pin heads and easy eye-pin tutorials.

The one thing we didn’t get to spend a long time on–and when I say ‘we’ I am referring to Julie Cleveland’s Polymer Jeweler’s Workbench overview article on engineering jewelry with cold connections, as well as the riveting tutorials–was some ideas for using rivets and eyelets, not just as a means of connection, but as independent design elements. One such example is this pin Libby Mills created some years back where secondary focal points are created with three rivets. These rivets certainly hold the polymer to their metal base, but they are balancing accents to the framed open space at the center. The rivets have a visually anchoring effect on what is otherwise a rather open design. Try to imagine this without the rivets. They are really essential to the composition, not just the construction of the piece.

Libby has explored polymer and rivets a number of times over the years as evident in her Flickr photostream. After taking a look at the things Libby has done with rivets you might want to visit or revisit the Riveting Polymer article and see if you don’t have a serious interest in trying your hand at making some riveting polymer work yourself.

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