Damage Control

By my count its week nine of a ten or eleven week summer session so let's see what I've got going. First it's the ring for my rubber molds, I finally got them all made yesterday and had a chance to to test them out with mixed results.

Mixed results in this case means a lot of incomplete waxes that are difficult to pry out of the molds in one piece. Oh well, as long as I can get one good casting of each...

For my production stuff it's going fairly rocky at best. I have this thing in wax that I don't know what to do with (it's also huge at two by three inches).

In terms of a full "line" of jewelry all I've got are these earrings with CZs in each end of the tubing,

A mock up of the pin with a quasi standard pin back since my clever and different pinning method didn't work,

A necklace that doesn't lay well and has subsquently been modified to limited effect,

And, finally this strange ring being shown upside down. It's a set I'm not especially thrilled with, but there's hope yet!

In the form of these earrings, that is. I ran out of stones to set in the end of the tubes, but I did order more material to make them, and a couple other items to go along with them.

For example there's these two ring ideas and a chain necklace as featured in this hot sketchbook on sketchbook on scanner action. While I wait for the supplies to make these items, there isn't much to do except make samples of them out of copper and brass. There's also the theme and name of the line to decide on which will be some futuristic space stuff since the earrings look like cheap sci-fi show set design, perhaps an engine room of some sort? What ever brings me an excuse to go through one of my favorite sites again before packages from jewelry suppliers start trickling in tommorow. Hooray for Summer ordering!

Gaudy, Gaudy, Gaudy

Do I watch Antiques Roadshow? Yes. Am I man enough to admit to it on the internet? No. Anyways here is a big old Tiffany sterling silver and enamel vase made for the 1893 Colombian Exposition worth about $50,000-$100,000. On the show they kept referencing how ugly it was, though the more I looke at it the more I admire parts of its garish decoration, like the three handle loops and especially the enameled curves in the middle. Part of that is probably due to me not actually owning the vase, or having seen it in person.

Here's a George Nakashima shelf, who was a woodworker and had a different piece some one brought in on the same Antiques Roadshow episode. He has an interesting aesthetic, retaining as much of the natural shape of the wood he uses as possible, as well as sometimes using obvious butterfly joins in his pieces. There an old article in LIFE magazine here where he talks about his work, and a website here. Yes I am more interested in the obvious connection points than in the natural edges, since a natural piece of metal would look largely like a dirty rock.

Despite the heat I managed to get a couple of pieces "done" before giving up on it. Here are the matching earrings to go with this wax pendant from last week. The earring on the right has already been sprued for the eventual rubber mold, I still need to do the same to the pendant, but it's also too hot for wax work.

These are the offical earrings for the rubber mold making class, complete with ugly old sprues coming out the bottom. The ring still needs more work, but I'm thiiiiis close to finishing all of my postives for the molds. the next trick will be to scrounge up enough silver for all of these, though they are fairly light weight, excepting the pendant. Hopefully soon I can get into what must be a blistering studio and actually make this stuff, ideally after it has rained some and cooled down.

So until then its back to the drawing board for production and waiting out the heat.

Half Baked and Not in a Good Way

Completely uninspired, I've been messing about with wax and a couple other things to no real avail. Did start on a small tree sculpture I have wanted to make for a while, in hopes that it would lead to some sort of inspiration.









Before embarking (ha ha!) on making the tree sculpture I made this pendant and earring sample which look pretty bad, along with an agressively mediocre chain sample. I just can't seem to come up with any good production ideas, particulary ideas that come in a full set of earrings, necklace, and pin.



After six hours of sketching in front of classy television shows from the 80s all I could come up with was this pendant (which does have matching earrings by the way) rendered here in a new stiffer blue wax I bought to play with. It looks distressingly famliar to me though, like I've seen it somewhere before.

I also came up with the design for my last rubber mold making project: the ring. Initally I was going to make it out of wax first but it requires some tight bends the wax doesn't like doing no matter how much I heat it up. I have a little rutilated quartz cabochon I will set into this ring, can you guess where?

Welp, this creative block is no fun, and usually I solve them by going to a museum or some such place to look at other people art. Unfortunately, I am largely stuck at home next week due to honorably jury duty. At least I may be able to finish these projects I've started if the weather's cool enough to use a torch for long periods...



Corn Hill Trip Report

This past Sunday I went to the Corn Hill Arts Festival in Rochester, NY. For those not in the know it is an annual summer arts festival held in the historic Corn Hill neighborhood in the heart of the city, which means artists come to hawk their wares in the summer heat for a weekend.

This year I noticed they had less vendors, but higher quality goods. Many of the obviously Chinese made and commercial product resellers weren't there this year, and the obligatory Comfort Windows/Bath Fitter/other home improvement businesses were confined to the area around the gazebo, along with most of the food vendors. It's a good thing that the festival appears to finally be weeding out the lesser merchandise, even if it does raise the average price of goods.

Since pictures are largely frowned upon (some artists even have no photographs please signs on their booths) I'll have to make due with the websites and images within of a few artists.

I got this pitcher in red from ceramicist Allan Ditton, who was quite happy that another artist was buying it and had some interesting advice basically amounting to having a fallback option like teaching. There is more of his work for sale here, if anyone is interested.

Now each year the festival has a section for emerging artists, which according to their website is for artists aged 15 to 25 who have never been in a juried art show before. I like to go through this often small and deserted section to see if there is any great hidden talent. This year there was glass artist Nick Cohn, who had these beautiful small vases, all of them were perfectly proportioned, no lopsidedness or anything. As you can tell I like the black and white marbled ones the best and may yet buy one from his Etsy shop.

Out of all the jewelers at Corn Hill this year I was suprised to find only one person, Heidi Kester of Woodland Wisp Jewelry Creations, who uses Precious Metal Clay to make pieces. As much as I hate working with clay, there are some advantages with its flexibility and I have been curious to try the sort of witchcraft that clay, once fired in a small kiln, becomes metal.

As you can see I've saved the best for last, the amazing designs of Trisko Jewelry Sculptures, by Robert and Helen Trisko. Naturally they had much much more at the festival all if it very architectural jewelry and all of it gold. This is actually the second time I've seen a jeweler with thousand dollar price tags at a festival and the only reason I can think of for them being at a craft show is purely for advertising's sake, especially when we're discussing solid 14 and 18k gold pieces that go up to 10,000 dollars, literally.

Overall it was a really good Corn Hill and much better than in years past. For the record this year's must have item was iron dragonfly lawn ornaments that had been welded together, and quite bargain priced. Also no one can come up with anything creative to do with beach glass outside of drilling it, wire wrapping it, and bezel setting it. With this distraction over, it time to get back to work on my own stuff, and perhaps, finish something.

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Earrings...

Here they are hanging in a row. After being away from the internet (by virtue of being busy) I've come to the conclusion that this jewelry thing may not be as easy as I initally hoped. Specifically I am supposed to develop a production line of jewelry and keep coming up with tangental things instead.

Like these spirally earrings that take a whopping foot of wire to do. More earrings is fine and good and all, but I really need more pins and pendants that aren't like this:

I hardly ever actually do pendants or necklaces thus everything is turning into an exercise in fustration, and fustration leads to wierder earrings apparently, like this purposefully backwards one.

Dunno if having the ear wire coming out of the front is too wierd for people to handle. In other news I made a rather meh looking rubber mold (finally), and am now something of an expert in cutting recording media apart.

As for the mentioned cutting recording media apart I have learned the following:

         - Records cut way too easily.
         - Laser discs are twice as thick as records due to their double sidedness.
         - Compact Disc labels gum up the saw blade quickly, and won't stay on once the disc
            is cut.
        - Center punches do a good job of cracking both Laser Discs and CDs.
        - Laser Discs and CDs are smelly. As in they smell more like acrylic than acrylic itself.

I have yet to find a double sided DVD to cut up and see if that alleviates the problem of the label and foil flaking off of regular CDs. I was so hoping I could have more colorful earrings like the ones at the top of the post too by using labeled CDs but I guess it's not to be.

So it's back to the sketchbook to try and come up with sets of necklaces, pins, and earrings. I'd like to focus on getting something to go along with my heart shaperd pin/pendant from a week or so ago. Also on the horizon, experimenting with some silver on copper dishes I found. We shall see exactly how many possible ways there is to destroy plating...