I hit up the Rochester Gem Show last week and got some nice stones from it. Though it seemed like this year the dealers had more specimen samples than cut stones I still feel like I found a ton of good examples, and I made smarter decisions about which ones to buy. I have plans for most of them at least; like the denim lapis on the tape strip and similar sized stones will be put into some more copies of the Jupiter Pendant, the snowflake obsidian piece will go into earrings, the sugilite I want to make into a pin, the unakite into a pendant, the list goes on.
I haven't been in the studio as much as I want to be, therefore I only have sketches of future plans for the production projects and a couple of designs for CAD.
I have been slowly working on the large rainmaker necklace (as I have dubbed it) at the top of this page and you can see some of the plans for my new stones and senior show here.
Laser cutting! All my laser cutting ideas for my Digital Methods class and another varation on my tube setting earrings for production. I am a bit excited to laser cut some earrings for sale and just ordered some sterling tubing for more production. If anyone wants to save the date for the student sale this year it will be December 5th and 6th opening at 10 AM or so each day.
I also want to have these drawings laser cut as a pair of earrings, perhaps they would do well in the sale?
Still haven't forgotten the earring jacket idea either even though I need to work on it some.
Also begining to run out of concluding noises and sounds to end my posts with this semester, but continuing with my subtheme of creepy radio transmissions from last week have the Russian Woodpecker.
This one is radio interference caused by the Duga-3 over the horizon radar system in Chernobyl meant to give early warning of missles coming from America to Russia. It was operational between 1976 and 1989 and interfered with shortwave radio to the point that devices and radios began to be made to eliminate the annoying noise caused by the system. Welp hopefully next week will have cheerier material and some jewelry being worked on to show the world.
Certainly have been missing from the internet for the past few days eh? This sort of thing happens when you wind up in a week long metal inlay workshop but more on that in a bit. We last left off with the Moldy Vote pin, here it is finished with the sample pin next to it. It is an alright piece, though my attempts to stain the ribbon with black tea did not work out.
This is how far I've made it in Illustrator drawing and coloring in two tools. Have I mentioned I hate Illustrator? The paths in this drawing are all messed up and will take hours to fix just so I can dump some simple fills on it and I still haven't had a chance to do it due to the drama of our club participating in the Homecoming Banner Competition. Still have no idea who the winners were on that....
And now for something completely awesome, the metal inlay workshop with the visting artist from Japan. The artist was Professor Satoshi Hara from Kanazawa College who was here as part of a faculty exchange with Buffalo State. He showed us a traditional metal inlay technique that uses no solder: it is entirely pressure fit by chiseling channels into your piece and hammering in your inlay metal.
There are different varieties of dots lines and shapes you can do with this technique you can see where I was begining to inlay a larger twelve millimeter circle.
The final project was to decorate our very own lathe turned brass swing cup Professor Hara had brought with him from Japan. I wasn't able to finish it before the end of the workshop but we have some of the specialty Japanese tool steel so we can make our own tools for it. I just have the crossed lines to finished and I wanted to inlay twisted copper and fine silver wire in them.
So while I attempt to balance a million future projects (look for more production pieces soon!) have a creepy noise interlude for the fact that Halloween is fast appraoching as the remnants of hurricane Sandy also comes up the coast.
Its the Conet Project recording of the Gong and Chimes numbers station. What is a numbers station? Well to paraphrase Wikipedia, they are radio broadcasts of an uncertain origin widely assumed to be transmitting code to spies. And the bulk of them sound fairly creepy. The entire four disc set of recordings can be downloaded here and the most famous of the stations is nicknamed UVB-76 and you can try listening to it live here on this blog.
