Silver Filigree of Andhra Pradesh

In Filigree work, twisted silver wire is the material, and the articles have the trellis-like appearance of jali which endows them with rare charm. Silver-wax is widely used for making ritualistic objects. Silver-filigree is a style by itself which Cuttack in Orissa and Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh produce in Puru metal. For this, pure-silver ingots are put through a wire-drawing machine. In the pre-machine days the ingots were beaten on an anvil and elongated into a long wire by passing it through a steelplate - wiregauge. The very fine hair-like wires are still done only in the old drawing technique, then twisted and flattened. Two thinnest wires are wound together two or three times on a Charkha after heating and then flattened again to get is as thin as the single wire originally was. A filigree object is a combination of a number of component parts pieced together.