Cycles, Cycles, Cycles

This video is the perfect representation of how my last two weeks of classes are going to be. Beginning with jewelry my plans run thus:

Here are 13 blanks for trillium shawl pins just annealed that need to be chased and have the copper leaves soldered to them. After that its clean up, sawing forming, patina and lacquer, plus the creation of the pin stem too.

For those leaves I have been making these sheets of copper very holey. Other products for the student sale include ye olde interlocking triangle, link a dink, pins. I have 17 of those mostly together and am currently cranking out some extras to bring it up to an even 20. The planned d-pad pins I think will have to wait until next years student sale, where they will at least fit with the theme I preemptively chose, so consider this a hint as to what it will be.

I'm hoping to be done with the production stuff by Monday so I can focus on the actual last project for jewelry: a large flower necklace with lots of texture.

The run down for the other studio classes looks like this:

Weaving! A scarf! Fibers! It's much more fun (despite loom threading mishaps) and makes more sense to my 3D oriented mind than dyeing or screen printing. for my 60 inches of scarf I'm just going to repeat the brown-red-orange-yellow-blue section 15 times and go all out for a striped scarf.

There's no picture for 2D Design since that project hasn't really been started, and is a retread of things I learned in 6th grade, namely one and two point perspective. This time I have to draw up a city and paint it in black and white acrylic. Couple with the other studios and my lecture classes requiring last minute papers these next two weeks are doomed to be spent in absentia from my blog until finals week when I can breathe and unveil my grandiose plans for next semester.

Motivation Again! Sort of...

Now that I've gotten pass the whole narrative problem with the first project I'm motivated to actually work again! This time the project is production, and I have many grand plans for that, probably too many to make before the student sale in December.

So here's how my jib is currently cut:

Thus far I have a headstart on making my Link a Dink triangle pins by cutting out forty textured triangles to make 20 pins. Now I have to file, solder, and clean them up. Provisionally they are going to be priced at $25, not sure if that will change. From the scraps I hope to make more "Melty" pins as well.

My third plan for production is to tap into the geek market a bit (I have no idea how far art nerds overlap with regular nerds) by making d-pad pins from this controller. I have yet to double check that the patents and copyrights to the NES design have expired but I'm mostly certain they have.

You may notice the lack of my theme in these projects, but don't fret! some flower and weed modeled hair pins are in the works!

I have thick copper wire to use for the pin part of the hair ornaments (graciously given to me by a plumber friend) and only one idea for what to stick on top: a clover. That will be done by layers of copper sheet cut into thin petals and bent upward. Though since hair pins are not popular at the moment, I may not put them into the student sale.

For fibers I have been making julienne fries out of a linoleum block carving a train wheel to use as a background for the unit on fabric printing. I went with a fun harmless theme of trains just to have a break from the serious development of a semester long one. So far I will use this block to have a random base pattern of yellow, orange, and red. I still don't know what to put over it, perhaps I will emulate a train poster form the 1930s.

For the record this is what the inside of an NES controller is like. It also works exactly like a Genesis controller does yet the Sega ones wear out faster. I also have another project brewing in 2D design and went to the opening night of the Art in Craft Media exhibit at the Burchfield-Penney Museum. If I ever get a chance to go back and take decent non-cell phone pictures I may write up a full review, but for now I leave you with this: The craft exhibit as a whole has some solidly designed pieces and good craftsmanship of course, but seems to lack some sort of wow factor or break out work.