How to make Silver Sand Dollar Jewelry

How to make Silver Sand Dollar Jewelry

Can you make a necklace out of a sand dollar? Have you ever wondered how I make Sand Dollars into jewelry? 

I'll explain to the best of my ability, how to make Sand Dollars into necklaces for you. 

Step 1: Find the specimens in the wild. This can be the hardest part. It is not always easy to find the perfect sand dollar shell that is not broken - they are very fragile.

Step 2: Examine them really carefully to make sure that they don't have any abnormalities in them that might not translate very well to jewelry.

Step 3: Give them a nice clean and and get ready to put them in a two part silicone mold. A two part silicone mold is where you it has an activator and a just a regular part and you mix them together and they start to harden very quickly.

You'll need to put the sand dollar right inside of that and capture all of the detail and then cut it off with a scalpel and make a little channel down to where the hole where the sand dollar was.

Step 4: Inject your mold with hot wax. Once that hot wax has cooled, you'll be able to then add a little bail (the place where the chain goes through) or a place for the earring hook to go through.

Step 5: Now you are ready for casting! At Morning Moon, we do what's called lost wax casting. This is where you'll take your wax sand dollar with its little wax channel (remember, it's exactly like your original sand dollar) And if you're careful, you'll actually able to keep your original sand dollar shell once you take it out of the mold if it's still intact. 

And then you put your wax sand dollar into something that's very much like Plaster of Paris, it's called investment. You'll put that in the kiln overnight at really high temperature. And basically what happens is the wax through a little hole on the top of the of the plaster mold evaporates. 

Step 6: And then you'll come in with your melted metal, whether it's the beautiful jewelry grade bronze that we use for our golden collection, or if it's sterling silver, or you can even use gold! So you melt whatever metal you're using. And then you pour that into the empty place that you where your wax was. And then you let that cool.

As you can imagine it's very charred silver or charred metal inside you cleaned up you cut them off their trees, and you finish them and you make them into the finished jewelry.

Step 7: Now you are ready to finish your handmade sand dollar necklace.

From here you'll decide whether to oxidize them or polish them to us frosted silver finish.

And Voila! You have now made your very own handmade sand dollar necklace out of your favourite sand dollar shell. 

Of course if this all sounds like too much work to make your own sand dollar necklace, you can always browse our collection of handmade sand dollar necklaces