Earrings, Ear...rains?

It turns out that I may like shiny and round laserdiscs too much to cut them up, just look at it up on my bulletin board there. Real life did get in the way of making earring prototypes which is why I could only make four and two half pairs. That will make more sense as we dive into the pictures of what I did make and did not have time to make!

Yep those clicky clacky record and metal earrings from last week are back along with

earrings that I rather like and have been told look like gladiator style or "something from Portal,"

this pair of sterling and vinyl ones that are kinda Sonic the Hedgehog looking,

another random acrylic and brass pair plus,

two single earring jackets made from Pente pieces, hence the "two half pairs" bit.

Onward to things that could have been, starting with this revamp of last week's leaf earring jacket into a full earring.

A combination tuxedo/five inch floppy disk earring! Actually this one was supposed to have the black acrylic bit swivel out from the silver triangle part, but alas time ate that one, too.

For giggles the original design of the blue pente piece earring jackets,

some sort of random seesaw earrings,

still messing around with an old oscilloscope based design,

treble clef earring with chimes hanging from them,

and, finally, the corresponding bass clef pair. This is the point where I ran out of ideas in the sketchbook, you see. From here I get to go on to make five pin prototypes/samples, which real life threatens to loom over as well. As a teaser, here are the two simplistic pins I was able to make beforehand: a 3D/not 3D cube pin, and a blobby X thing. Consider them a preview for next week.



Plastics Really are the Future!

Despite being slammed to the wall with daily life, I was able to crank out these single earrings as samples for production.

Since I foolishly said I banged these out over the weekend I now have been set to making ten more earring samples and five pins which will be interesting as real life theatens to take over this week as well.

On the upside in the pre-critique for these pieces they were greeted favorably which naturally means I hated them. Still I wanted to further explore combining acrylic with metal and of course started coming up with a boat load of interesting designs after the critique. Side note: everyone liked the leaf earring even though I think its the most boring thing ever but, I have redesigned the earwire for it so stay tuned I guess?

Somehow in all this I remembered records are made of vinyl which is a plastic and that there are tons of them to be had for dirt cheap at thrift stores so new material ahoy!

I'm pleased to announce cutting a record is easier than acrylic, even factoring in how thin it is, and quite fun actually! Im also glad it didn't shatter even when drilling it to start making these earrings:

I wussed out and didn't use silver sheet for the overlaying tear drop pieces because the sheet I do have of sterling is a lot smaller than I thought which is why these look a little like roads, but oh well. The next step is to ball up some silver wire for ear wires on my fancy home soldering system:

Also work mates are awesome and everyone should have at least one, go to Sears now and buy one, I command it!

For the other earrings I'm going to attempt to make an image dump post with the finished projects as the sketches aren't much to look at and make little sense to anyone but me. And as for other alternative materials to explore there's always laser discs.

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.

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.)

A Few Good Midnights

A week of all nighters and a good week (or two) to recover from them makes Veronica a late posting girl. I narrowly finished this semester in time but I did it, dual wielding torches all the way! Hence why I completely forgot to take any pictures of my metalsmithing stuff. Between that class and ceramics, I'm fairly certain vessels and I don't get along very well, but boy do I like purchasing them from shows and thrift stores.

I digress, mostly because there isn't anything happening immediately right now, and for that I'm grateful to have a break between projects. To start, the end of year round up for jewelry looks like this:

One Pac-man necklace,

One pair of VR glasses, (what made them super secret is the arms of the glasses have little yellow LEDs in them, powered by a battery in the fake plug)

And finally one sword like spoon for a gentleman's eating contest. (Which no one seemed to understand)

Briefly here is the final portfolio for CAD which I was mostly proud of:

 Castle Exercise,

 Flashlight Exercise,

 Rubber Duck Exercise,

 Lollypop Exercise,

Toy Robot,

 Perfume Bottle,

 Ring,

Table and Chair Set.

 Can you tell I enjoyed CAD? Next fall I get another crack at it and probably will focus on lighting objects in the program. Before then though, I'd like to take a moment to talk about the upcoming summer projects.

Though not quite exactly what I'm doing, this experimental pendant is a good place holder picture when talking about production! Yes this summer it will finally happen, I will be designing and making jewelry to sell in the fall and winter student sale. This also means an Etsy shop will be in the near future, so stay tuned for details! This venture officially launches next week, with my summer independent studies in jewelry. While I prepare for the business world looking into cards, photographs, and taxation I'll have just enough time to see Albert Paley's Lecture at the Nan Miller Gallery here in Rochester. I'm particularly excited to make it to one of his exhibitions this time, since I had to miss his last one at the Memorial Art Gallery.

Its going to be an exciting, if busy, summer and I can't wait to get cracking and see what I come up with!

Like Frying Bacon

As you have probably noticed (all two of you who read this blog) I haven't posted anything for the past two weeks, but this time I have an awesome reason for not doing so and that reason is this:

Welding. Say it with me, welding. W-E-L-D-I-N-G, roll it around and contemplate it. More to the point my last two Saturdays have been spent at the Rochester Arc & Flame Center taking their two day eight hour sculpture class that uses the MIG welding process. The simple way of explaining it is that its a lot like using a glue gun. The longer way is that a consumable wire electrode is fed through a torch tip like gun with an inert gas to shield it. A circuit is made (with clamps and things) which make an electric arc that melts the metal together. You also have to hold the tip of the gun 1/4th to 3/8ths of an inch away from your welding. Too far away and it spatters and pops but when its the right distance away it sounds like frying bacon. 

After practicing laying down beads, it was time to have fun practicing with scrap! From left to right I have a lousy abstract sculpture, a cool  doorstop, a base for a bud vase, and a small wall hanging. Personally, I like the doorstop and wall hanging the most along with the final project for the first day of the class:

A Universal Positioning Device (To borrow the one of the instructors' jokes!) To us laymen it is a stool and a surprisingly handy one too. Bonus fact: I cut out those cross braces with a plasma cutter, which was lots of fun and easy to use, except it shows every stop, start, and jittery hand movement you made.

Day two was eight hours to work on a sculpture you designed. I decided to go all out since part of the reason I took a welding class was to work in a larger scale. It took me an extra hour and quite a bit of help, but I ended up with

THIS FREAKING AWESOME FIVE FOOT SEVEN INCH GIRAFFE!! There's nothing to say about this other than it's a big ol' animal sculpture and I made it. Other than being wildly happy about it I already have a million touch up plans to make it even better. Of course because of all this I've been eyeing MIG welders in catalogs and staring at a short TIG welding workshop also offered by Arc & Flame because apparently TIG welding, although difficult and finicky, can be used in jewelry.

Enjoy this giraffe head detail before we must return to college arts, which also has had a lot happening on that front, from Runway 5.0 to me finishing my super secret glasses project.

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!