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...