Riveting my Brains Out

Don't worry I got them back in later. So why rivets? Well, you see, like many long, strange trips to brain loss I began making the tiara project in my basement during the last two days of break.

While doing that I revised my original plan a little bit in order to incorporate more spoons into the tiara, this is the only sketch I made showing what the right side of the tiara would look like.

And here it is riveted together. I decided to cold connect the entire piece because I used silver plated spoons and heat will ruin the finish.

Because I scrapped much of my original design there was lots of trial and error with masking tape. The dangly rhinestones over the nose (theres a rhinoplasty joke in there somewhere) never made it into the final piece, among other ideas too ridiculous to photograph.

This is the basic form of the tiara all riveted together, what remained was to decorate it with found objects which some of the holes for riveting those were done on the drill press at home.

The top image is the first trial layout of items and the bottom is the later, mostly final arrangement of objects on the tiara. By this time it was Monday and I was back at school.



Here it is half riveted at about 11 o'clock on Wednesday night, after obtaining more drill bits, when I decided it would be a better idea to go to bed and finish it on Thursday.



And here its is finished! Enjoy the four picture turn around of it. There are 30 rivets holding it together including the found objects. Besides the spoons (of which there are 6.5) going from the left there is a gold domed clip earring wire wrapped on, a pink and white plastic leaf necklace part, silver crescent shaped pierced earring, 1940 Canadian penny with copper disc underneath, two buick key knock outs, a Chrysocolla cabochon in a copper star, an gold clip earring back, a re-created necklace hang tag (I broke the original trying to get it attached), three brillant cut CZs and blue plastic gems in a nickel-silver volcano setting, a wire wrapped brown plastic clip earring, and a bee clip earring. All of this makes it a heavy piece with a lot of weight towards the front, you can't look down with it on or else it starts slipping down your forehead. Form over function I suppose...

I'm so proud of this work I actually decided to be pretentious and dug out my stamping set and put my initals plus the date on it. The bonus picture on the right is most of the rivets visible on the inside of the forehead band. They've been crushed pretty smooth so they don't catch too much on one's hair. Speaking of which...



Here it is being worn and me doing my best "concentrating on pressing the shutter" face. I'm going to be submitting this piece for the fashion show that the fashion tech department does each year, this year jewelry is doing a bit of a collaboration with them, and I hope my piece gets accepted! Now, some of you may be wondering what happened to the asteroid necklace and well.......

It got casted, the smaller one is 1.6 ounces and the large tree is 12.6 ounces of brass. Coincidentally, we found out the electromelt can maybe hold 14 ounces of metal. It looks like I'll be working on this again Friday morning when I hand in my tiara untill the next project is assigned.