Damage Control

By my count its week nine of a ten or eleven week summer session so let's see what I've got going. First it's the ring for my rubber molds, I finally got them all made yesterday and had a chance to to test them out with mixed results.

Mixed results in this case means a lot of incomplete waxes that are difficult to pry out of the molds in one piece. Oh well, as long as I can get one good casting of each...

For my production stuff it's going fairly rocky at best. I have this thing in wax that I don't know what to do with (it's also huge at two by three inches).

In terms of a full "line" of jewelry all I've got are these earrings with CZs in each end of the tubing,

A mock up of the pin with a quasi standard pin back since my clever and different pinning method didn't work,

A necklace that doesn't lay well and has subsquently been modified to limited effect,

And, finally this strange ring being shown upside down. It's a set I'm not especially thrilled with, but there's hope yet!

In the form of these earrings, that is. I ran out of stones to set in the end of the tubes, but I did order more material to make them, and a couple other items to go along with them.

For example there's these two ring ideas and a chain necklace as featured in this hot sketchbook on sketchbook on scanner action. While I wait for the supplies to make these items, there isn't much to do except make samples of them out of copper and brass. There's also the theme and name of the line to decide on which will be some futuristic space stuff since the earrings look like cheap sci-fi show set design, perhaps an engine room of some sort? What ever brings me an excuse to go through one of my favorite sites again before packages from jewelry suppliers start trickling in tommorow. Hooray for Summer ordering!

Gaudy, Gaudy, Gaudy

Do I watch Antiques Roadshow? Yes. Am I man enough to admit to it on the internet? No. Anyways here is a big old Tiffany sterling silver and enamel vase made for the 1893 Colombian Exposition worth about $50,000-$100,000. On the show they kept referencing how ugly it was, though the more I looke at it the more I admire parts of its garish decoration, like the three handle loops and especially the enameled curves in the middle. Part of that is probably due to me not actually owning the vase, or having seen it in person.

Here's a George Nakashima shelf, who was a woodworker and had a different piece some one brought in on the same Antiques Roadshow episode. He has an interesting aesthetic, retaining as much of the natural shape of the wood he uses as possible, as well as sometimes using obvious butterfly joins in his pieces. There an old article in LIFE magazine here where he talks about his work, and a website here. Yes I am more interested in the obvious connection points than in the natural edges, since a natural piece of metal would look largely like a dirty rock.

Despite the heat I managed to get a couple of pieces "done" before giving up on it. Here are the matching earrings to go with this wax pendant from last week. The earring on the right has already been sprued for the eventual rubber mold, I still need to do the same to the pendant, but it's also too hot for wax work.

These are the offical earrings for the rubber mold making class, complete with ugly old sprues coming out the bottom. The ring still needs more work, but I'm thiiiiis close to finishing all of my postives for the molds. the next trick will be to scrounge up enough silver for all of these, though they are fairly light weight, excepting the pendant. Hopefully soon I can get into what must be a blistering studio and actually make this stuff, ideally after it has rained some and cooled down.

So until then its back to the drawing board for production and waiting out the heat.

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Earrings...

Here they are hanging in a row. After being away from the internet (by virtue of being busy) I've come to the conclusion that this jewelry thing may not be as easy as I initally hoped. Specifically I am supposed to develop a production line of jewelry and keep coming up with tangental things instead.

Like these spirally earrings that take a whopping foot of wire to do. More earrings is fine and good and all, but I really need more pins and pendants that aren't like this:

I hardly ever actually do pendants or necklaces thus everything is turning into an exercise in fustration, and fustration leads to wierder earrings apparently, like this purposefully backwards one.

Dunno if having the ear wire coming out of the front is too wierd for people to handle. In other news I made a rather meh looking rubber mold (finally), and am now something of an expert in cutting recording media apart.

As for the mentioned cutting recording media apart I have learned the following:

         - Records cut way too easily.
         - Laser discs are twice as thick as records due to their double sidedness.
         - Compact Disc labels gum up the saw blade quickly, and won't stay on once the disc
            is cut.
        - Center punches do a good job of cracking both Laser Discs and CDs.
        - Laser Discs and CDs are smelly. As in they smell more like acrylic than acrylic itself.

I have yet to find a double sided DVD to cut up and see if that alleviates the problem of the label and foil flaking off of regular CDs. I was so hoping I could have more colorful earrings like the ones at the top of the post too by using labeled CDs but I guess it's not to be.

So it's back to the sketchbook to try and come up with sets of necklaces, pins, and earrings. I'd like to focus on getting something to go along with my heart shaperd pin/pendant from a week or so ago. Also on the horizon, experimenting with some silver on copper dishes I found. We shall see exactly how many possible ways there is to destroy plating...

Error! Recalculating... Error! Recalculating...

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.