Metal Lace Lotus Flower for Backflow Incense Holder

This is serious metal working with special tools, but if that's for you, this is how you easily make these lotus flowers with filigree beads.

Soldering iron and hot air soldering tool and lead free solder

Drill with bits

filigree beads

Hammers, doming tools

Pliers, cutter

Rubber abrasive wheel and a machine to go with it or maybe hand files

You will be needing five filigree metal beads. These are iron core, silver tone and 16mm. You can open these on the other end, just twist the hole up and use pliers to bend the sides open. Cut the hole away so that the petals will be uniform.

Work beads opening them one by one more and more, fitting them together so that they form a flower.

Hold the bottom layer firmly and add solder to it and the bottom of the next layer. Layer them and melt the solder. It is a bit easier if you add solder to the inside of the next layer too, the heat transfers better and melts the layers faster. Do this to every layer.

Add more solder to the flower, so that when you drill the hole the flower doesn't fall to pieces. This I made with hot air soldering tool that I can heat up to 400 degrees celsius, because there starts to be quite alot of solder and it doesn't want to melt anymore. This will also add more weight to the flower and it will hold incense cones upright better.

Now we have a nice flower and if you need just a basic incense cone holder, there you go, but if you drill a hole to it, it will be wonderfull backflow incense cone holder. Half of the machinery is to come up how to hold a piece firmly. This is very annoying piece to hold but I have found that microfibre dust rags are just wonderfull for this. Drill a smaller hole first, I don't even know what size I did. Then I drilled 6mm hole to the flower.

Now we have this nice flower with a hole. I happened to have some unwanted blob of solder in there but these grinder bits are just wonderfull to get those off. Then I bent the tips of the petals so that it was prettier, that's completely matter of taste and I grinded the tips to be nice and rounded with an abrasive rubber wheel. You can use file or then again, you can let them be as they are, matter of taste.

And then you are done. If you want, you can soak the flower in isopropyl or rubbing alcohol to take the residue from solder off, but I was all out of isopropyl alcohol so I skipped that.

If you want something to burn in it, here's a tutorial I made! Incense Making Made Unserious