This is similar to bean casting, but it involves pouring silver over pine needles or an old whisk broom.

As always, make sure to keep safety in mind when doing any sort of project. In this case, you will definately want to do this in a well ventilated area. You also want to keep a cup or two of water handy to quench any fires the molten metal starts.

Here I have a bag of ordinary pine needles from our area. These are pretty long ones.

The first thing I do is to grab a handful and make sure they are all parallel in my hand.

Next, I rubberband them snugly together.

The next step is to trim off the ends of the needles so that they are all pretty much the same length.

Here I trim the other side.

Notice that the ends are pretty close to all the same length, but not perfect. This is just fine.

Next, you should find some sort of container that will hold the needles upright. I just grabbed a flowerpot and put some tinfoil in it, because that was what was handy. A coffee can works pretty well for this.

If you have a crucible to melt the silver in, great, use it. If you don't, you can hollow out an area in an old two by four with your Dremel or Foredom to use as a crucible. You can actually get quite a few pours from a two by four like this.

I keep some borax handy to sprinkle on once the silver is molten to help rid it of impurities.

I usually put a little pinch of it on the two by four so it is easy to get to when I need it.

Notice how when I start heating the silver, I have already arranged everything into position where it will be easy to reach. I have the needles right next to my makeshift crucible, and the cup in the foreground contains some water.

Keep moving that torch around so you heat the metal evenly.

The metal is starting to melt and puddle up.

The metal is hot enough now to add the borax. Keep the torch on it while you do this with your other hand.

Just added a pinch of borax.

Now, very carefully, I am going to lift the two by four with my free hand while keeping the heat on the metal. I will slowly move it so the metal is right above my pine needles.

Note that I keep the torch on the molten metal even while I begin to dump it into the top of the needles.

The needles generally catch fire at this stage, so I am going to put them out with my homemade fire extinguisher.

It doesn't usually really stink until you put the fire out, but then it smokes quite a bit.

Once everything is drenched, you can pull the needle bundle out and start to take it apart.

In this photo, you can see that this pour fragmented somewhat. This happens sometimes. I'm going to keep looking through it though to see if there are any pieces that are big enough to incorporate into some jewelry. If not, I can try the process again.

Here's a nice one with a kind of neat pattern.

You probably want to spread out the needles to make sure that you find all of the small pieces of silver.

Looks like we came out with two pretty nice ones this time.

The remaining pieces I will remelt and try again. These others could be incorporated into any number of interesting pieces of jewelry. The neat thing about needle casting and bean casting is that no two castings are ever exactly alike. Have fun with this.

*Handling hot or molten metals carries an inherent risk, and we cannot be held liable for injuries caused by this.

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