Brief Explanation
The world has a funny way of providing opportunities if you open your eyes to them. One of those opportunities for me came when my day job made the ridiculous decision to hold the yearly company meetup only a two-hour drive from me when the company I work for is headquartered on the other side of the country for the second time in a row. It felt like someone was playing a joke on me. The company was even willing to pay for a flight… for a two-hour drive (not that I took the offer).
The meetup was fun, but the most amazing thing is that it was right down the street from the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, a place filled with gemstones, minerals, and some of the most amazing fossils. I had some ideas, but I honestly wasn't sure I would find anything that I would want to plate or turn into art, but I got really lucky! I managed to find a booth where the owner was willing to let me pick through a bag of ammonite fossil bits and pick out whole ammonites for just a dollar! I asked some of the right questions and found out he had small trilobites too! All in all I ended up with roughly five trilobites, ammonites, and mosasaur teeth for just a couple of dollars apiece at most.
I was just starting to get it, my copper plating was starting to come out of the bath nice and shiny almost every time, so I finally got to expand my skills. I moved to trying to apply backings to the pieces that allowed me to make them into necklaces.
It wasn't easy to plate things as small as the backings, but I got it. I decided to make a necklace for myself with trilobites and an ammonite where I simply super glued the backings to the pieces. I ran into a problem where the pieces didn't sit right when put next to each other, so I wound some silver wire into a coil to act as spacers.
Next I plated my other ammonites and gave my partner the choice of which one she wanted as a necklace, after all, she is a biologist. Of course, she picked the coolest looking one in the bunch. One thing I struggled with is that the backings weren't very secure with only super glue, so I decided to get creative. I took my stained-glass making tools and attempted to solder a backing to the ammonite. For a bit there I didn't think it would work! I had to heat the entire ammonite to the melting point of the solder to get it to bind to the piece without solidifying. Turns out, copper is such a good absorber of heat, that it dissipated the heat of the melted solder and turned back into a solid!
It took a bit, but I managed to get it all together neatly, and when I plated the entire piece—solder and all—it all went copper too! At the time of writing this, it's still one of the pieces I think turned out the nicest: it maintains the detail of the ammonite while bringing out the features with the metallic sheen, all put together as one piece of metal so that without truly breaking it, it won't ever come apart.
