Silver Heart Necklace For Vegan Animal Lovers
I have been a vegan on and off for a total of 8 years of my life. I first became a vegan when I was 17 years old and while I was somewhat motivated by a love of animals, it was not my main deciding factor. I know most vegans are doing it for the animals, and so I recently created a silver heart necklace for vegan animal lovers.
My handmade silver heart necklace for vegans is hand cut out of 0.8 mm thick 925 sterling silver sheet, which gives it a nice weight, but not so heavy that its clunky and uncomfortable on your neckline.
It arrives in an eco-friendly recycled Kraft cardboard gift box, with the card insert “Vegan for the animals” which is a popular slogan in the vegan community. Vegan community - that sounds silly, but it exists!
925 sterling silver is made of 92.5% silver mixed with copper. Though pure silver is available to work with, 925 sterling silver is popular for jewellery making because the small mix of copper makes the metal easier to work with, mould and shape, because copper is a softer metal than silver.
That helps me and other jewellers when we are doing things like cutting through the silver, sanding the silver into a specific shape and so on. Which leads me on to explaining how I cut that sterling silver heart out.
How do I cut the heart out?
Like this in my video below!
The first stage is to draw a heart shape, I use a pen to draw and scribe on to the silver plate., after which I use a hacksaw with a very thin blade, to saw the shape out from the rest of the plate.
After I cut the heart out I use a Dremel hand sanding tool to make the edges neat and make sure the heart is a good shape, and then I hammer it to death! Hammering is a very popular jewellery technique that I'm a big fan off, I find plain flat silver a bit boring.
I like jewellery to look a bit battered, and I think the light bounces off the indents nicely. I also like the way it makes each silver heart necklace unique.
Sure I could buy a machine cut silver heart and hammer that, but that would be cheating, and probably not as cost effective as cutting out my own. The lower I keep my costs down, the better prices I can offer for high quality sterling silver hand-made jewellery including this silver heart necklace.
One of the biggest reasons a person decides become a vegan is because they don't want to cause of death of an animal through their dietary choices. But not all vegans make the choice for this reason, there are other reasons people choose this lifestyle, and many who do it 'for the animals' have these motivations in mind also.
Reasons for becoming a vegan
For the animals
Of course yes this is the number one reason for most vegans. Many people believe that as animals are sentient and intelligent it is wrong to take their life for our own consumption, because humans do not need to eat other animals to survive or be healthy.
Often a person who is vegan for this reason shuns animal by-products beyond food, such as leather for instance, as these too require the death of an animal. They may also be careful not to use products that have been tested on animals.
For health
For some vegans one of their reasons is health, and they believe that it's natural for humans to eat animals when killed humanely. Many people are not aware that not all vegans are animal rights activists who do it for the animals.
It's well documented that on average vegetarians live notably longer than meat eaters; for men the average is 7.28 years, and for women the average is 4.42 years. For vegans life expectancy is even better.
It's typical for those following a plant-based diet to have a lowered risk of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. In part this is due to the removal of meat, but it's also likely that a vegan is someone more likely to make healthy food choices in general.
For the planet
This is another powerful reason people choose to become a vegan. Aside from living longer they have a positive impact on the environment, which as we all know is in crisis.
Mass farming, which is not the way humans ate meat in the past (we ate far less meat than we do now), has placed a massive burden on the environment. The sheer amount of crops and the water required to grow the crops that feed farmed animals, is placing an incredible strain on the planet's resources.
Mass farming is contributing to reforestation, loss of animal habitats, soil erosion from over grazing and the release of an excess of methane green house gas into the atmosphere from the animals themselves, which contributes to global warming.
Some interesting links
