Surrender to the Dye

When my sister was first learning to dye her own fabric, she learned a valuable lesson.  You can't control dye, you have to let it do what it wants.  Thus the mantra was born: 

Surrender to the dye.

I have had a similar experience, although if it was control I wanted, I could have had it, if I could just have been a bit more patient.

Here I have a bezel cup pendant, and I am about to fuse one of my sterling balls to the side of it.  

Now, there's two ways I could have done this.

One is to fuse the two pieces together.  This will work only because everything is fine silver.

The other way would be to use solder to make the connection.

I have no solder, so I decided to be a happy idiot and see what would happen.

And what happened was that several of the smaller sterling balls fused with some of the medium sterling balls, making large sterling balls that may or may not have actually fused with the pendant.

Which is all good, as it turns out, as I was going for an organic look, and you can't get much more organic than letting the silver decide for itself how and where it's gonna fuse.

And this isn't even the latest.  Several of the deelybobs came off as I was trying to sand the shine back into the piece.  But it's still all good with me.  I learned something, and I'm pretty sure this is going to turn out to be a stunning pendant, when it's all polished.