Flint stone arrowhead pendant

The design of this pendant is 'loosely based on a Chalcedony arrowhead'. The idea came from a visit to the Geologische Museum Hofland.

The idea was to capture a cabochon cut Onyx in an arrow-shaped sterling silver pendant. The Onyx is flanked by two other members of the Chalcedone family, red Carnelians, as a homage to the Chalcedony arrowhead that provided the inspiration for this pendant.


Here is the initial design. well, not the initial-initial design, because the red Carnelians were added only after my initial-initial design was improved by my dearly beloved, artistic, insightful and ever so clever wife.

Here, the design is getting more '3D'. Not by the use of a fancy 3D printer, but by using simple hand tools to form a piece of aluminium wire to fit the design. I really need this to see if a design works, as my visualization skills lack. You can see I wrote down 'Granaat' instead of 'Carnelian'. I could tell you that 'Granaat' is Dutch for 'Carnelian', but it is not. I simply thought all red stones in our stock were Garnet (Granaat) and did not read the label at the bottom of the container...

Here is the Onyx bezel getting shaped in sterling silver. It is a nice job, I like making bezels for stones.

The bezels for the smaller Carnelians proofed to be a pain in the *ss to make. I Also found out the we should have bought other mandrels for making bezels. The tapered ones instead of the stepped ones, as the stepped ones s*ck.

I managed to fabricate the bezel anyway, although it took way too much time. The result justifies the effort in my opinion. Here is the pendant almost finished. The frame and bezels are not soldered together, and the stones are not set yet.

Then, I got really involved in soldering, quenching, pickling, sanding and soldering, quenching, pickling, sanding, sanding and polishing so I have no more pictures from the intermediate stages. Which is rather convenient, because I managed to disintegrate the smaller one of the Carnelians in the process. Fortunately, we had another one in stock So Fast-Forward to the final result: My arrowhead pendant, perched on another Chalcedony mineral!

This pendant is for sale in our webshop.