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!

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!