Ancient Fashion of the 1950's

While I take a couple weeks off from making jewlery, let's take a look at the latest random thing I've found on the internet.

It appears British Pathe has been posting interesting clips from its news reel archives for a couple years now and they have enough fashion based ones to have their own youtube channel for them. I'm starting out here with one showcasing costume jewelry earrings from 1955. I'm still impressed by how fast the model changes screwback earrings.

There's at least two that cover 1950s glasses with designs that are way too radical, even for the present. The other one is here if you're curious. I bet there's a few of my classmates that wish they found something this when the glasses project was going on last year.

It starts tumbling into the truly strange with swim cap fashion (shown here) to umbrellas and then probably the wierdest thing to consider:

Dog Fashions. I don't recall the last time anyone gave serious consideration to dog clothing and accessories. I'd like to blame an apparently 1950s obsession with having to coordinate and match everything, but I don't know really.

There's plenty more gold to be had off of the Vintage Fashion channel (can't spoil everything by reposting it here) but don't forget there's also the regular British Pathe channel which has more general news reel footage and links to a couple other sub-channels.

That leads to things like the Dynasphere from the 1930s, which was kind of meant to be the car of the future and whatnot.

Plus footage of the Miss Honeywell "robot" that made the rounds at many technology expos and conventions in the 1960s just before commercially available industrial robots became available, so it it's still in that little dream bubble of how the future was supposed to be. The clip also may or may not have led me to buy a Honeywell branded desk thermometer from a thrift store, it's pretty cool.

Just to get this out of the way, this is a (British?) Pathetone clip thats been on the internet forever showing what 1930s designers thought we would be wearing in the year 2000, in case you haven't seen it before.

And if fashion and vaguely science fictiony things aren't your bailiwick, there's everything from the Hindenburg disaster to Arnold Schwarzenegger winning Mr. Universe in 1969 to how (not) to be a secretary to absolutely grating footage of a "singing" dog.

Alright one more fashion clip, this one's from 1969. It shows off Paco Rabanne's new futuristic designs which are dresses made of unusual materials, and the clip emphasizes the ones made of metal.

Wonder why that material hasn't caught on yet.

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!

Science Fiction Flashback & Studio Blah

While prowling around the internet recently I found out that the Star Wars concept artist, Ralph McQuarrie, had passed. It's interesting to look through the images of his work and to find out through the article that he was responsible for much of the Star Wars aesthetic. It also hadn't occurred to me that Star Wars does indeed have its own distinctive aesthetic as compared to other sci-fi franchises. Perhaps it's because I was more of a Star Trek kid?

Nothing thrilling happening on the studio front; my love-hate relationship continues in ceramics, the details are driving me up the wall in CAD, I'm doing super secret things in jewelry and finally finished a piece in metalsmithing. My nested vessel went from this:

To this over an all too short spring break:

During which time it gained the title Sea Flute and coincidentally resembles this lamp at ARTISANworks which is a take off of Maryling Monroe's white dress in the infamous photo of her standing over a street vent.

I swear I made Sea Flute before I even saw the lamp, I guess curving, flared forms are in now? For anyone who missed it my thoughts on ARTISANworks can be read here in last week's post. Ciao until the next project lurches towards completion!

Brewed to Perfection

This post has been percolating for at least two weeks for your enjoyment; since I keep having to revise it again and again because so many art projects became due all at once. First the fun stuff: somehow I came across this link to a 87 minute documentary on hulu called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade. Though not the best documentary, it did explain to me a lot about Twin Galaxies, Walter Day's desire to keep track of arcade high scores, and a good portion of where are they now for the guys who had the top scores.

Through the interviews you get a sense of what the arcade culture was like and their perspective on how and why it died so abruptly (Home gaming surpassing the arcade as well as rougher clientele showing up to  arcades). It's still difficult to imagine what arcades were like having missed that entire period of video gaming history but virtue of having been born in the 90s, but it sounds awesome.

While not "researching" games I have been camping out in the studio working on a few things and completing things at a rate that feels way too slow at times.

CAD class at least is quite fun and I completed the first project a while ago, which is this sweet wind up robot. I thought I was on to something different with my color scheme, but alas looking around the Internet there is at least one retro tin wind up robot with the same green, red, and yellow. At least the design is different, toy makers and sci-fi filmmakers didn't base too many robots on an egg shape (Robbie the Robot comes closest).

Next is ceramics, which is still not a favorite medium of mine. The left is a coil built vessel with red and black slip with sgrafitto in it, post improvements. My snake pot came out of the raku firing well (middle picture) but it didn't clean up as well as I would have liked (right picture) the snake was supposed to be a blue-green, but I guess I didn't slap on enough layers of glaze. At least it looks kinda ancient? Anyway on to Metalsmithing...

Where my angle raised vessel is almost the shape I want it so I can start worrying about building the base and ordering some super special awesome materials for it. I got a good start on the catenoid, though I get the feeling I'm doing it wrong, judging by the interesting blisters I some how gave my self hammering it and the charming surface cracks it developed. It's now a gamble as to how complete this will be by the due date since I have been focusing most of my time on jewelry.

I have the chain together and I just got the clasp soldered together last night. Tonight I have to round up some two part epoxy in order to add my last minute decorative doodads to the clasp. The cheese grater holes inside Pac-man's mouth will have a rats nest of colorful wires glued in; left over from when I dismantled three Genesis controllers to make a little model chair for intro to 3D Design. The big copper loop will get a cut in it so I can string on wooden Parcheesi pieces, spaced out by brass tubing, which will also conveniently cover the break in the wire.

Now provided I don't get distracted by attempting to beat lousy and unusual games in the the Pac-man franchise or by such paltry thing as sleep or dinner I should be able to finally finish this necklace and get on to designing the VR glasses.

Cram Crammity Cram Cram

The semester's winding down so its one final push to get all the pieces done for Monday's critique at the unholiest of exam times, 7:40 in the morning. Here's some pictures of the current state of things:

The kalimba looked like this when I went to go work in the studio at 3:00 and after some funky soldering setups later...

I had these at 9:00 when I decided I couldn't take it anymore and left:

Now Veronica, you may be asking, what's with this boring picture of mostly wire? there's nothing going on in it! To which I say oh ho! you are wrong for there is a metric ton of stuff going in in this picture! Let me articulate you for my master plan! Tomorrow I will:

• Get up at 8:00 (optimistically).
• Actually get up at 9:00, maybe.
• Get breakfast and got to the store for hydrogen peroxide.
• go to the studio and begin stringing the asteroids on to the necklace, bending the now hardened wires, cleaning, and correcting drill holes as I go.
• soldering the end cap asteroids on to the wires, then preparing a solution of hydrogen peroxide and pickle to take off the copper plating our regular pickle always leaves behind. (Remember no steel in the pickle, kids!)
• Then I will keep hammering my piece of steel music wire flat and eventually cut it to make keys for the kalimba.
• The kalimba itself needs a lot of clean up still to make it nice, shiny, and excess solder free.
• Attach the keys and adjust them so they are sort of in tune.
• Go home.

So there's a lot to get done tomorrow not to mention yet another final paper to worry about, so I shall now leave you with this thought: kalimbas are also called finger pianos and I've unintentionally made mine in the shape of a grand piano. Irony.

Thank God For Museum Studies

So there I was in my museum studies class ruminating on needing an idea for the next project in jewelry when we were doing an exercise on object based learning. The object and photograph my partner and I were working with was of one of these the professor bought from World Bazaar in the Galleria Mall:

Hers was more like the one on the right. Now what these are are a musical instrument, originating in Africa, variously called a finger piano, thumb piano, sanza, kalimba, or mbira. its played by plucking the tines to make notes. The point is, I wanted one and when it hit me that the instrument was just steel tines sandwiched between three metal rods screwed onto a sound box, I realized I could make one for jewelry! ....maybe.

Now I think its an unusual enough instrument that it could go for science fiction; it's not as weird as a theremin, but good enough especially if its given a radical space age shape. But therein lies a problem. You see, many instruments are made of wood for a reason, it's because wood vibrates and resonates to amplify the plucking of a string according to my glancing through wikipedia. So if I decide to make a thumb piano out of metal what does that do to the acoustics of the instrument. Will it produce no sound? A soft sound? A tinny or metallic sound? It must be a crap sound since I can't find any one silly enough to try making an instrument's sound box out of metal.

The closest I could get to it is was this video of a guy who made a prototype thumb piano for a camp project idea.

The bulk of his sound board  is still made of wood, but the top appears to be metal which makes me wonder if it will be possible to make it entirely of metal and still get a sound, perhaps an alien sound? Therefore to test it I am going to follow his example and buy an Altoids tin, some bobby pins, and assemble a quick and dirty one using some scrap metal to tack down the pins. Worse comes to worst I save this idea for when I have to take wood shop!

P.S. 50 years ago today Yuri Gagarin was the first man to go into space! As a further aside Google changed their logo for the event, it looks quite a lot like Russian stamps that commemorate space flight.

Tantrums and Tiaras

To unwind from the stress and minor freakouts over the asteroid necklace I thought it best to get a head start on the next project by sketching and drafting a blog post by staying up way too late before my 8:00 am jewelry class. Let's get started shall we?

I know absolutely nothing about this singer or their album but I compulsively saved this image for its cool visual reference to the 1927 film (and art deco masterpiece) Metropolis, particulary by combining the robot character Maria with the look of the city enviroments featured.

Naturally Maria is on the left and the city model/matte painting are on the right, and this sort of angular modernism was my gut reaction for a style to base the tiara in when I first heard about the project. If you'll recall the spoons I mentioned earlier, they fit right right into this idea given that grapefruit spoons are rather pointed with a serrated tip. So, I set about sketching various arrangements for the spoons:

Most of the sketches use the spoons in boring crown arrangements, I even had a sketch that strung wires between the radating spoon handles reminiscent of this gentleman's headgear. But, these designs went out the window when I recieved more specific requirements for the tiara.

According to the project shee,t the tiara not only has to tie to your theme but also be based on or for a character from fiction, history, or myth. Going on myth, I then wanted to incorporate an old idea for triangular brass flowers into the tiara and from there my mind leapt to the cliche of a post-apocalyptic future where technology is forgotten and surviving humanity has reverted to magic and mysticism.



Wait, What?


See, I happen to be playing my way through an old NES game called Crystalis, where the plot is that a war reduces humanity back to medieval times and you as the hero (recently revived from a cryogenic sleep) must stop an evil army from conquering the world through the used of forbbiden technology combined with magic. In the game, I found a gas mask which I needed to enter a forest filled with poision gas and was struck by how this was a leftover technological object used by a society now devoted to magic.

Now because I wanted to still incoporate both the spoons and the geometric brass flowers into the tiara I set about reconciling this as something a mischevious fairy might do; that is make themselves a crown of "natural" flowers and leaves as well as any found objects that appealed to them, such as stones and shiny things like...spoons. The post-apocalypse loss of magic works into this scenario with this fairy character being someone in the future who uses magic and models himself on what mystical creatures do, that is, wear crowns made of natural materials. So this future-fairy makes his crown, a symbol that denotes a magical being to him (and us), from bizzare flowers plus found objects in the random derbris left over from the past humanity. Therefore we get something that looks like this:

This is a tiara that has a brass base plate with two silverplate spoons riveted to it and triangular brass flowers on copper stems woven through with seemingly random stone settings, both regular bezel and volcano bezel set. It's a thrilling design I want to get started on right away, but the first order of business is to make a paper model and carefully plan each element for functionality and to prevent a too cluttered look.

Now you may be asking who is this "fairy" character that's supposed to be wearing this? I've looked into this and decided to go for the one of the first two characters that people associate first when faiaries are mentioned, Puck from A Mid-Summernight's Dream. I am well aware that Puck is technically not a fairy but an elf, and that most depictions of him do not have leaves in his hair. But, he is a mischievous character who practices magic and could be malevolent if left to his own devices in, say, an apocalyptic magic based future, so Puck it is.

Plus, a working title of Post-Apocalyptic Puck works on so many levels better than Post-Apocalyptic Oberon, don't you think?

Asteroid Fields Forever

As promised, my entire snow day was devoted to homework, which was mostly four classes worth of art history readings. And, thanks to the sweet, sweet internet on top of it, I am even later in posting final sketches. But, to make up for it, I will post the absolutely amazing steel and duct tape necklace models too! 

The left image is the sketch of the asteroid necklace from the last post and the right is the wire model version. Not visible is that there is no chain in back, its entirely wire with a gap to fit around ones neck like a cuff bracelet fits around a wrist. These types of necklaces are as commonplace as this design, though they're usually one plain wire to accomodate a slide pendant. I knew this design was going to be boring: the only way to make it futuristic would be to flip it upside down and wear it on my head for the tiara project next.

Very Silly.

So what if the gap in the necklace wasn't in the back but in the front much like this style here? well then we wind up with this:

Once again the idea isn't agressively bad, it just lacks that certain special sci-fi something. What makes this design leap that extra step?

Zipping right up off the shoulder! Much of science fiction is taking an idea to its extreme limits and that includes all the impractical doodads jutting out of helmets and headdresses of scf-fi costumes, examples I have surely seen, yet what ever terrible movies or book covers they graced have been completely blocked out from my memory. Nevertheless, what started out as a simple desire to melt brass has quickly grown into something stupidly complex, curiously like nearly every other jewelry project I design. I swear I don't plan for these things to be this way!



I'm sure everyone by now has noticed the missing asteroids from the models. This is due in large part to being too afraid to find out how much the extra weight will deform the necklace, and realizing clay does not have the same mass as metal for testing purposes. Plus, I only have five feet of sterling silver wire, which means there are only three 20 inch pieces that aren't quite enough to make it around a neck. So, after much discussion with the professor, we devised the master plan illustrated above and detailed below.

• First, we cast a silver ingot for the back of the neck piece highlighted in blue, and lengthen it with a large asteroid on one end.

• Next, I solder three 20 inch pieces of 12 gauge round dead soft sterling silver (which is in the mail) to the other end then bend and hammer to work harden and shape it. the ingot will provide extra length to keep the necklace on the body and hopefully have more wire rising off the shoulder for a dramatic effect.

• Lastly, melt, reticulate, and drill brass asteroids to string on the wire with spacers of some sort between them.

Right now I'm hoping the necklace comes together as planned, and if im extrodinarily lucky I won't need any of the structural reinforcement ideas on the above sketch, I have no idea how to incoporate them into the piece smoothly. Until next week however it's time to do some reticulation research!

Blog Inaugural

A new semester means new jewelry projects to over complicate; this time to the tune of one singular theme. And, as a bonus, the entire process is to be featured live on The Musery blog! Without further ado, onward to the creativity!

As one may have guessed from the above picture (the eighth hit on google for science fiction) this semester's grand theme is science fiction. After briefly considering the usual idea of nature that leaps into everyone's head when confronted with a need for a theme, and debating the use of gears for the first project, kinetic adornment, it occurred to me that science fiction also uses lots of mechanisms and I like science fiction a whole lot. I'm also hoping for a shot at a quasi unique theme, even though I've outed my self as some one who can argue why the classic series of Doctor Who is better than the new one and how Captain Kirk defeated the Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek II was cooler than in the 2009 movie.

What particularly endeared me to sci-fi is the possibilities for the second project, a tiara, since there has been no end to wild, wacky, and stupid head gear featured on alien females and a few males. And this theme should be helpful for the super special mystery secret third project, as science fiction has always been an opportunity for designers to go nuts, for better or worse. For evidence of this I humbly submit the infamous GM promotional short Design for Dreaming, made when sci-fi was the future and the future was sci-fi. (And if heavy doses of sarcasm are required the MST3K version is here.)

At the very least it ought to be interesting researching the hopes and dreams of tomorrow, fictional or otherwise in order to ape those smooth curves and impracticality that screams "The Future!" And the most excellent place to begin my search is with one of my favorite websites, Tales of Future Past, maintained by a David Szondy and chronicling exactly how we were meant to be living in the future.