Fairly Pretty Pictures

Alright let's do this! I don't have the right backdrop for it, but on with the pictures!

Astro Ring, Sterling and Rutilated Quartz Cabochon

Wing Earrings, Sterling and Black Chatoyant Cabochons

Jupiter Pendant, Sterling, Turquoise, and White Cubic Zirconia

Three Tier Tube Earrings, Sterling and White Cubic Zirconia

Tube Chain Necklace, Sterling and White Cubic Zirconia

"Gladiator" Earrings,  Sterling and Red Acrylic

A Cat in Bamboo? Okay Then...

Reverse Earrings, Sterling with Acrylic

 

Curly Earrings and Pendant, Sterling

Click Clack Earrings, Sterling, Brass, Laserdisc, Record, and Compact Disc

What the? A...crane?

How did these pictures get in here?

Oh I get it! They're building a bridge,

Ha ha he's smoking a pipe while working! Ah hrm anyways,

Triangle Earrings, Copper, Sterling

Brass Capped Earrings, Brass, Black Acrylic, Sterling

Protype Tube Earrings, Sterling, White Cubic Zirconia

Gear Pin, Brass, Copper, Nickel

Sonic Spike Earrings, Sterling, Record Vinyl

Lion's Eye Pin, Acrylic, Brass, Nickel

Cube Pin, Brass, Nickel

Spiral Green Earrings, Acrylic, Sterling

Heart Pendant Protoype, Brass, Copper


There you have it! an entire Summer's worth of jewelry work and distractions. Some of these pieces will even be up for sale fairly soon and if anyone's really interested drop me a line through the blog. Watch for a bit more to come in terms of the tubing based jewelry and the reverse earrings too! In two weeks the Fall Semester begins and so will the unveiling of the new theme. Until then don't forget to double stack your trailers.

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!

Quantify It!

For some reason I am apparently not allowed to see Albert Paley or an exhibition of his, since this is the second time in a row an illness has prevented me from going to see him. Le sigh. In other news my summer independent studies have started and that requires a blog post mandated from on high!

First a note about the weather. I expected it to be hot in the studio, but good lord it was probably almost literally 100 degrees the first day and no one was doing any torch work, the lights were off, and a Bunsen burner was used only twice. The first thing I had to do naturally was go and get a thermometer, stick it to my bench and write a sign underneath it saying "quantify it!" The idea being that it is much more fun to complain about the heat when you know exactly how hot it is even though it changes nothing about how miserable it is.

I made these earrings as part of a hydraulic die forming work shop (that Chris Irick lovingly came to present) and thought I would try to do something along these lines for my study in production. My professor said it was too simple and to come up with a variety of simple shapes to hydraulic die form and then combine into a piece that looks complex. This got me thinking about modularity, and particularly about this Avon pin:

It's a partridge in a pear tree I believe, and you can wear the pin with the bird in the tree or take off the tree and wear just a cute little bird. Currently, I am wondering if its possible to apply the idea of the pin to earrings and have made a few sketches to that effect.

A part of this project will probably involve me finally making embossing plates, and I have a few objects lined up to take patterns from with photographs, put in black and white, up the contrast, then tile or other wise manipulate in Photoshop. Perhaps I will even have an excuse to bust out my tablet!

On the other independent study hand (does that mean the left doesn't know what the right is doing?) rubber mold making has gotten off to a good start, I've seen the demos so I just need to carve or fabricate something over the weekend starting with a pendant and including stone setting in all the planned projects.

Here are the stones I picked from my stash for all of the pieces. The mookaite on the left will be for the pendant, the rutilated quartz in the middle for the ring and the black chatoyant somethings on the right will be for earrings. The malachite is hanging around in case I get motivated or inspired to use it instead. Now because the mookaite looks like this,

I have been making pendant sketches based on Jupiter's atmosphere.

It's given me a great excuse to dig out all my old astronomy books and to raid JPL's image site, which used to be a great source for computer background images. Fun fact: I did consider going to college for astronomy, but I realized I mostly just liked looking at the pretty pictures. There's still time to become an amateur though I'll probably just visit the Astronomy Picture of the Day site more often. (they have bigger images for backgrounds hint, hint.)