Stumbling Down Memory Lane

As of late I have been helping to clear out the house in preparation for some improvements, which leads to finding all sorts of old crap like my old Tamagotchi with, oddly, it's instuction manual too. Turns out you could actually pause those things. But, I also found a whole trove of my old jewelry stuff from high school and since I haven't posted recently, you guys get an extra long post with more images then my internet can handle!

The class began with practicing bending wire, the first two follow patterns the teacher had laid out and the third one was me messing around.

This was the actual project to build off the wire practice. I remember choosing the treble clef pattern just because I needed a larger curving and swooping element to be visually larger and contrast with the chain. I put in the jade bead just because I found it in the classroom and liked it, and I also remember coiling wire on round pliers and flattening them to make my chain links.

We then learned how to saw and thus I made this cuff bracelet, everyone thought I was nuts back then; I was only dissapointed that I had to scale it down from interlocking octagons to interlocking squares. Thankfully I'm much more accurate with a saw blade now.

In between projects I discovered classic Doctor Who (before it was called classic) and plowed through most of the Fourth Doctor episodes. Here's the tardis key from that era and I assure you I made it completely accurate front and back with three layers of sweat soldered sheet metal.

Now here's where things get confused, since I've forgotten which order the projects were outside of them being done in the last half of my senior year. The center ring I do know I made ealier that school year, and have always wanted to remake it in sterling silver.

Aaah! its a flock of old dudes attacking. I blame anime (in some obtuse way) for making my old man winter here. The left one was some sort of texture sample; don't bother looking at it larger there's hardly any on it. The right image is more old men heads this time thickly cast in pewter via a plaster mold.

On the bright side I cast this letter opener handle in pewter as a present for my Mom, and it turned out suprisingly ergonomic as a bonus.

These are little frog charms if you ask me and they are tribal women if you ask my old jewelry teacher. But I still cast them using the cuttlefish method, resulting in the funky layered texture.

My first encounter with acid etching ended in a double sided pendant partially eaten away. Never futz with the stength of the acid while your piece is still in it.

Enameling was rougher, my sample piece attests to it. Like most of my other enamel attempts it got overbaked in the kiln but my actual project worked out fine.



Hence, a parroty bird thing and a Buddha I never finished and never could quite figure out what to do with.

The title is Cat Book. Why? Because a bird has landed on an open book about cats and it snapped shut, catching the bird.

I know for sure this is the last jewelry project of high school because it was the bubble wand project! This actually worked fairly well when I tested it on the last day of class and always a fun way to end a class.



I hope you enjoyed this trapse through my high school jewelry class and all the bizzare things I was apparently thinking about back then; going from music to Doctor Who to old men to frogs, parrots, and cats. Digging up this stuff was fairly informative for me: it confirmed my suspicions that I have gotten worse at soldering and better at sawing since then. It also rubbed it in how I was able to crank out more pieces a year than I currently can. Ah well live and learn I suppose? Toodles!