Steaming the Wood
Steam bending wood is not as complicated as you might imagine, especially for jewelry where your pieces of wood are relatively small.
Steaming
I steamed wood for this design in a pressure cooker, with a 1/4" of water in the bottom, for 5 minutes. A regular vegetable steamer basket in a covered pot works just as well, taking about 12 minutes instead. The most important part of steaming is having a good stable form(jig) that allows you to quickly apply a lot of consistent pressure. The photo below doesn't show it, but it is usually best to add some sort of support to the outside of the wood between the pegs and the wood. I often use an old plastic ruler, which really helps prevent cracking of the outer surface during bending.
Once you pull the wood from the steam, you have about 20 seconds to get it in the shape you want. The faster, the better, preventing rebound and cracking.
Drying
If you have the time, wood should be left in the form over night. However, this prevents using the form for that whole time, so I usually dry the wood in the form with a hair drier for about 15 minutes and then add a rubber band to prevent rebound while it dries completely overnight
Metal to Wood Riveting
After cutting out my design in sterling I needed to attach it to the wood using a reliable cold connection. I soldered 20 gauge sterling wire to the ends of the sterling sheet to be used to rivet the metal to the wood. The hole drilled in the wood needs to be reinforced with brass tubing to allow the riveting to work at all, otherwise it will sink into the wood like a miss hit nail.
