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A lot changes in a week, for example my fancy Jupiter pendant from last week has turned into this:

Which then abuptly turned into this, ready for casting:

and it will be casted in brass this Thursday! I was also going to set these turquoise stones (plus a CZ in the little end loop) in it much like the lower right sketch, but I dropped one and broke it.

Oh well, it wasn't a particuarly great stone to begin with as I now realize. It's off to riogrande.com for a new, kind of expensive one.

Now because I wound up doing last minute cleanup and investing for casting my Jupiter pendant for mold making, I haven't gotten as far as I had hoped on my hydraulic experments for the production side of things.

First I tested what little I was able to round up and send through a rolling mill to "print" the texture on the metal. Above is what was left of the strings I used and wound up with shallow rope like lines on the sheet metal. I also tried some cheap old lace stuff which survived the mill, but also gave me a shallow kind of stippled pattern. Oddly the novelty paperclips worked perfectly well, observe:

And despite being probably made of steel neither the paperclips, copper, or rolling mill was ruined (well further ruined in the case of our old rolling mill, no wonder its being replaced).

In terms of what to actually do with said hydraulic forms and textures has been all thrown out the window at this point due to a debate between high end and low end jewelry. I had a inital idea to combine paper origami with metal in earrings etc. in order to have something within the twenty dollar or lower range for the student sale. Most of this short sightedness is due to the shawl pins from the last sale being too esoteric and too overpriced an item to sell and needing money to finance long term tools.

But since the mixed media with paper thing is border line junk that could be cranked out at a later date, I've re-thought a little for the long term and am thinking earring jackets are the way to go.

They're out there but not too out there, if you know what I mean. This way I can offer a cheaper alternative to the gold and white gold examples above and still have the mix and match modularity with the customer's own earrings I orginally was thinking about last week. This way the rubber mold making stuff can be higher end, and the bottom end can be the d-pad pins, a trefoil flower pin with a shape that accidentally looks like the Mitsubishi logo, and the hydraulic triangle earrings with roll printed designs I made for myself. Also stone settings and studs with white cz's would be relatively easy to make in order to pair with them.

Naturally now that I have some semblance of a plan I feel like I wasted a bunch of time on mostly unusuable hydraulic dies and other materials, but at least gained the advice that I should approach making jewelry to sell the same way I approach getting an art style which is to not force it and just let it develop on its own, meaning that I shouldn't try to predict what will sell to a market while trying to tailor to it and just make some cool designs I like.

Quantify It!

For some reason I am apparently not allowed to see Albert Paley or an exhibition of his, since this is the second time in a row an illness has prevented me from going to see him. Le sigh. In other news my summer independent studies have started and that requires a blog post mandated from on high!

First a note about the weather. I expected it to be hot in the studio, but good lord it was probably almost literally 100 degrees the first day and no one was doing any torch work, the lights were off, and a Bunsen burner was used only twice. The first thing I had to do naturally was go and get a thermometer, stick it to my bench and write a sign underneath it saying "quantify it!" The idea being that it is much more fun to complain about the heat when you know exactly how hot it is even though it changes nothing about how miserable it is.

I made these earrings as part of a hydraulic die forming work shop (that Chris Irick lovingly came to present) and thought I would try to do something along these lines for my study in production. My professor said it was too simple and to come up with a variety of simple shapes to hydraulic die form and then combine into a piece that looks complex. This got me thinking about modularity, and particularly about this Avon pin:

It's a partridge in a pear tree I believe, and you can wear the pin with the bird in the tree or take off the tree and wear just a cute little bird. Currently, I am wondering if its possible to apply the idea of the pin to earrings and have made a few sketches to that effect.

A part of this project will probably involve me finally making embossing plates, and I have a few objects lined up to take patterns from with photographs, put in black and white, up the contrast, then tile or other wise manipulate in Photoshop. Perhaps I will even have an excuse to bust out my tablet!

On the other independent study hand (does that mean the left doesn't know what the right is doing?) rubber mold making has gotten off to a good start, I've seen the demos so I just need to carve or fabricate something over the weekend starting with a pendant and including stone setting in all the planned projects.

Here are the stones I picked from my stash for all of the pieces. The mookaite on the left will be for the pendant, the rutilated quartz in the middle for the ring and the black chatoyant somethings on the right will be for earrings. The malachite is hanging around in case I get motivated or inspired to use it instead. Now because the mookaite looks like this,

I have been making pendant sketches based on Jupiter's atmosphere.

It's given me a great excuse to dig out all my old astronomy books and to raid JPL's image site, which used to be a great source for computer background images. Fun fact: I did consider going to college for astronomy, but I realized I mostly just liked looking at the pretty pictures. There's still time to become an amateur though I'll probably just visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day site more often. (they have bigger images for backgrounds hint, hint.)