Anglo-Saxon Bird Disc
This is a sterling silver disc with niello, based on a ninth-century Anglo-Saxon gold fragment in the British Museum. The original is just 8.9mm across — I can barely see detail work at that scale, so mine is enlarged. Gold is effectively unobtainium, so silver it is.
I chose this piece because the bird is endearingly goofy. I replaced the religious symbols with the letters R and M (for Ragnarr and Molly), and called it a belt mount, though I’ll admit that feels somewhat arbitrary given that we don’t know what the original was for either.
The disc was entirely fabricated from sheet silver. Each step seems simple in isolation, but the accumulated precision required — and the inevitable corrections — make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Everything proceeded according to plan through fabrication. The challenges began with niello.
On clean silver, niello flows like water — straightforward and satisfying. Niello applied over existing niello behaves entirely differently. It becomes sticky and lumpy, sits in globs reminiscent of dried rubber cement, and traps air bubbles. You sand away the excess and discover caverns beneath — voids as deep as the Mariana Trench, lurking just below that mounded-over blob. I heated and applied niello three times. The small pit beside the border grew from a pinhole into a mouth that threatened a small raccoon. After the third application, I accepted that further attempts would cause more damage than good. That hole is going to exist until the end of time. I declared it finished.
At this point, I’ve done all the damage I can do.
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