Danielle's Bud Vase - Part 1

This summer my husband and I traveled to Ireland where we took a 2 week silversmithing workshop with Brian Clarke. It was an amazing experience!
We learned two metalsmithing techniques:

1) Sinking - stretching the metal to make a domical form by pounding the metal with a ball-faced hammer into a depression, such as a carved piece of wood
2) Crimp raising - compressing the metal to make vessel forms by crimping the metal with radial folds which are then pounded smooth over a steel stake with a nylon or wooden hammer.

The following is the step-by-step process behind my workshop final project, a bud vase, which uses both these techniques...

I began by cutting out 2 sterling discs, annealing them and then began crimp raising one disc for the bottom half of the vase.

After several coures of raising, the shape is close to my template size.

Then I planished the hemisphere on a mushroom stake.

I wonder how many hammer blows it took to make it look like this? I wasn't counting! :) This portion of the bud vase took a full day (plus a few hours)...

Stay tuned...I will continue this step-by-step next Wednesday!