Nearly There

We're down to the last week of Summer semester, meaining it's time for a quick image heavy post about what has been done and what I still need to do. Observe then, eight pairs of tubing earrings with a total of 96 stones set in them finished.

 After that mess I moved on to the matching chain. the top picture is the holes being drilled for the chain links which shows off the tip I learned to clean up drill holes. You take a fairly large drill bit (at least three or four sizes bigger than the hole) and twirl it by hand a few times in the hole. It makes a nice beveled edge and knocks off the burs as evidenced on the left.

Bonus: my chain has this cute handmade clasp. Hopefully, it will stay working for quite a long time. I have actually finished this necklace and set some 40 stones in the ends of the tubes, but of that will have to wait a bit.

I finished six pairs of triangle earrings to add to the random production stuff. Just, you know, putting that out there too. I still have to lacquer some of the record/laserdisc/brass earrings and I decided to to give some of the "backwards" earrings a shot, making some in acyrlic and some in sea glass. Glass drilling experiments ahoy!

For rubber mold making I got the molds to work well enough to cast them. Here are the waxes from those molds with the stones sitting in them for fun. I still like the rutliated quartz in the ring.

In the center of this image is the incomplete casting from the first attempt at it and the waxes for the second attempt which failed even MORE via a blowout.

Thus this is the third attempt at casting the rubber molded jewelry, before I attached the squiggly pendant wax to the top.

It worked! The third time it worked! I had to ask another student about production sprueing and have them check it over, but it worked! Hooray, I can have fun with the long road to clean up, as well as setting the stones into these. Ideally I'd like to finish all this over the weekend, but I have to come into the studio Monday and Tuesday at least to conquer a production side project.

So much to do and so little time as always, if I stay motivated I will finish before next Friday (that's six days!) and have two weeks off to pack up for college full time. Plus I keep coming up with other projects and designs I want to start on instead. Well, at least next week there will be some prettier pictures as we look back on an incredibly hot Summer's worth of work!

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...



Summer Wrap Up

So as this first semester of junior studio closes there some final remarks to say. Firstly, as far as I know both of my pins in the charity sale sold and the entire event raised around $7,000 for Japan according to here! Yay! I'm hoping to make more Link-a-Dink pins for the December sale over the summer since that one was gone before I got to the sale. Gone at opening bell = popular, right?

Since I'll be home for the summer, my blog activity might taper off a bit with an internship in the wings, but there will be more other artistic and design things posted; like sketches, paper crafts, and what little jewelry things I can do at home, such as my nefarious plans for this brass tree trunk that once had asteroid leaves:

Muh, ha, ha, ha, ha, my plans for it are a secret, but it's too cool to waste an object like this. If I'm not careful it might turn into next semester's theme despite my plans to make more wearable objects. The only guarantee is that it's bound to be a long crazy summer, and I'll need a vacation from the vacation by the end of it!

Space Age Onion

Some time ago I mentioned getting in a book from the library called Where's My Space Age? and I was able to read it cover to cover. I'm still reeling from the disappointment a week later. By reading this book I had hope to pick up some quick inspiration, and learn about a design aesthetic. What I got was how these designs reflected the hopes, dreams, and fears of the society that spawned them, and how quickly the Space Age movement of the 1960s was crushed by reality; in this case the tumultuous decade of the 1970s.

As nice as it is to know how what the public thought about space and the future when it was a new frontier, it doesn't help from a design perspective. The book told me that synthetics were big, using old materials in new ways was big, (paper dresses anyone?) and so were impractically curved forms and mass produced modularity. But, the book never really told me any of the why, or the how for that matter. Why does this curve and that sphere mean "it's the future!" and not others? How come one leg or three legs or no legs on a chair automatically make it "modern" Space Age design?  I wanted hard compositional design analysis instead of interpretations about what these pieces mean. Perhaps I'll have to look elsewhere...

I guess the book was something like an onion, layer upon layer of disappointment the further I got into it. Speaking of which I've come home for spring break where we made an... interesting discovery in the basement:

Yep, an onion sprouted in the basement all by its lonesome self, just chilling in the bag with the rest of them. So, I decided to plant it in a pot for now, and I guess this summer we'll have lots and lots of onions!

Inspiration Train

So in my history of photography class I heard from the professor that the Chrysler Building had people dress as robots dancing on top of it as a promotional stunt during a World's Fair and that there was footage of it. Naturally, I had to go looking for it on the internet and all I could find was this nifty video set to a remix of Technologic by Daft Punk. There, they cite the dancing robots as being part of the opening celebration for the building. Anyway the footage I was looking for pops up from 1:36 to 2:20 but the whole video is cool and you ought to watch it.

And to keep the inspiration train rolling I just got the book Where's My Space Age in from the ILL office for more ideas and hopefully more information on what went into designing for the future. Because of this quick indulgence into Art Deco and Sci-fi imagery I now realize I desperately need to watch Metropolis and possibly infamously terrible sci-fi musical Just Imagine. Now where was I? Oh yes, trains:

Toot, Toot.