Week 12: My last full week in Athens 🥲

My overthinking brain took over, and I re-cleaned all the pieces for gold-plating and made sure everything was exactly as I wanted and that I had not forgotten any in a random space in the workshop. I left early to take them to the gold-plater, and that was Monday.

For the rest of the week, I brought my focus back to argentium and drew so, so, so much wire down. I definitely think there is something wrong with my drawplate. Whenever I try to draw down past 0.4mm, the wire seems to get snagged on something and break. I don’t have the tools at the moment to fix this - some cutting broaches would be nice - and because the hole is so small, I can’t see it anyway. It would be really great if I could get to 0.2mm, but I’ll just have to make do for now. And uh, because I refused to cut the wire so that it was more manageable, it kept getting tangled up into a silvery visual representation of the chaos in my head. Though it was kind of therapeutic to untangle it all, it made me really envious of the contraption Giovanni Corvaja made for himself to draw gold wire down. In conclusion, it was a lot of wire.

Fast-forward to Friday, I am still drawing wire down but also taking healthy breaks by assembling the sterling silver casts into jewellery. And excitingly, I went to pick up my shiny, gold babies from the gold-plater. Super consistent quality and no faults whatsoever, they look great 😊.

And given it was my last weekend here, I finally did the last of the super tourist-y things on my list. And what made it even better, my brother came to visit. We went to the beach, up the Acropolis and saw the Parthenon, to Delphi with a quick stop in Arachova for lunch and finally, Lycabettus Hill. Everything was beautiful. We also ate a lot of food. Of course. 😉

06 May 2026