I hit up the Rochester Gem Show last week and got some nice stones from it. Though it seemed like this year the dealers had more specimen samples than cut stones I still feel like I found a ton of good examples, and I made smarter decisions about which ones to buy. I have plans for most of them at least; like the denim lapis on the tape strip and similar sized stones will be put into some more copies of the Jupiter Pendant, the snowflake obsidian piece will go into earrings, the sugilite I want to make into a pin, the unakite into a pendant, the list goes on.
I haven't been in the studio as much as I want to be, therefore I only have sketches of future plans for the production projects and a couple of designs for CAD.
I have been slowly working on the large rainmaker necklace (as I have dubbed it) at the top of this page and you can see some of the plans for my new stones and senior show here.
Laser cutting! All my laser cutting ideas for my Digital Methods class and another varation on my tube setting earrings for production. I am a bit excited to laser cut some earrings for sale and just ordered some sterling tubing for more production. If anyone wants to save the date for the student sale this year it will be December 5th and 6th opening at 10 AM or so each day.
I also want to have these drawings laser cut as a pair of earrings, perhaps they would do well in the sale?
Still haven't forgotten the earring jacket idea either even though I need to work on it some.
Also begining to run out of concluding noises and sounds to end my posts with this semester, but continuing with my subtheme of creepy radio transmissions from last week have the Russian Woodpecker.
This one is radio interference caused by the Duga-3 over the horizon radar system in Chernobyl meant to give early warning of missles coming from America to Russia. It was operational between 1976 and 1989 and interfered with shortwave radio to the point that devices and radios began to be made to eliminate the annoying noise caused by the system. Welp hopefully next week will have cheerier material and some jewelry being worked on to show the world.
Certainly have been missing from the internet for the past few days eh? This sort of thing happens when you wind up in a week long metal inlay workshop but more on that in a bit. We last left off with the Moldy Vote pin, here it is finished with the sample pin next to it. It is an alright piece, though my attempts to stain the ribbon with black tea did not work out.
This is how far I've made it in Illustrator drawing and coloring in two tools. Have I mentioned I hate Illustrator? The paths in this drawing are all messed up and will take hours to fix just so I can dump some simple fills on it and I still haven't had a chance to do it due to the drama of our club participating in the Homecoming Banner Competition. Still have no idea who the winners were on that....
And now for something completely awesome, the metal inlay workshop with the visting artist from Japan. The artist was Professor Satoshi Hara from Kanazawa College who was here as part of a faculty exchange with Buffalo State. He showed us a traditional metal inlay technique that uses no solder: it is entirely pressure fit by chiseling channels into your piece and hammering in your inlay metal.
There are different varieties of dots lines and shapes you can do with this technique you can see where I was begining to inlay a larger twelve millimeter circle.
The final project was to decorate our very own lathe turned brass swing cup Professor Hara had brought with him from Japan. I wasn't able to finish it before the end of the workshop but we have some of the specialty Japanese tool steel so we can make our own tools for it. I just have the crossed lines to finished and I wanted to inlay twisted copper and fine silver wire in them.
So while I attempt to balance a million future projects (look for more production pieces soon!) have a creepy noise interlude for the fact that Halloween is fast appraoching as the remnants of hurricane Sandy also comes up the coast.
Its the Conet Project recording of the Gong and Chimes numbers station. What is a numbers station? Well to paraphrase Wikipedia, they are radio broadcasts of an uncertain origin widely assumed to be transmitting code to spies. And the bulk of them sound fairly creepy. The entire four disc set of recordings can be downloaded here and the most famous of the stations is nicknamed UVB-76 and you can try listening to it live here on this blog.
Okay so I haven't gotten that far in making my Moldy Vote pin, so let's talk about the digital methods class I'm taking for a moment instead.
Bam, a sort of southwesty looking hut.
Bam, the back of the ratty hut with a giant mouse jumping off the roof.
Bam, a swank interior with the chairs.
Here's one separate for your perusal (Bam!).
Bam, the barely passable animation. Notice anything different from the images?
Either my knowledge of Sketchup is embaressingly small or its got a few quirks since you may have noticed that the background color is different in the animation than it is in most of the still images. That is because even though the program is smart enough to apply the changes you make to the 3D model to all your "frames" of animation it can't handle changing the background color too. Here I am against a deadline so the animation remains as I had it.
Here is how far I have gotten on the Moldy Vote pin by the way. I have the back plate roughed out and currently doing a test threading of the front with the check mark. the next steps are to drill two more thread holes, solder the halves together, solder the pin back on, and then add the patriotic ribbon among whatever other steps I forgot.
For other random news I found out by never having switched my homepage off of MSN, apparently Russia just revealed they have a huge stash of industrial diamonds. Supposedly it's enough high quality industrial diamonds to supply the world for 3,000 years. I'm a wee bit skeptical about the claims, but if havoc is wreaked on the price of the shiny pieces of carbon soon we'll know why.
Today's sound interlude is brought to us by the Olsen Gang's 1976 movie The Olsen Gang Sees Red, particulary the most famous scene in which the comedic criminal gang breaks into a theater in time to the opera music playing. Do enjoy, and brush up on your Danish too!
I am simutaneously busy and not busy. I run around getting stuff together as the new president of the metalsmithing club on campus, yet have barely been working in the studio. More worryingly despite everything I have to do I don't concsiously feel stressed. Perhaps I've finally stumbled upon this "maturity" thing people talk about.
For actual jewelry class I have these sketches for the iVote project which is to make a pin about an issue and persuade the viewer of one side of the issue. I missed the persuasion part and came up with the "Moldy Vote" pin commenting on how half of all registered voters don't vote and those that do tend to be in their early forties. Some states even have made getting an absentee ballot even easier to try to encourage more voters (it's not working by the way). Design wise I like the middle left one and was going to incorporate a rattle in it, using it to symbolise a death rattle.
In lighter news I have been researching up on the newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat for my digital presentations methods class. In that class we are starting out by designing and making a chair in Google Sketchup which is quite a fustrating program if you have knowledge of any other CAD program. There's a couple nifty tools but there's a lot more I'm missing from Rhino.
Anyways by reading this and this book on Krazy Kat I finally understand why the strip is so well regarded, as fine art even, plus I found some strips I enjoy/like the art in:
All this Southwestern U.S. art research is because I've designed a geometric southwesty looking chair like the background mesas in Krazy Kat and needed the justification. I don't have a spendiferous screenshot of the chair I have mostly made in Google Sketchup but it is based on this chair by Garry Knox Bennett:
Finally to continue my posting of noises, sounds and music I like (or in this case have fond memories of) have this:
Also a remix by some one else:
Ahh young enough to have trouble remembering the world before the internet, yet old enough to remember the horrible noise made by the 56k modem as it dialed, and being unable to use both the phone and the internet at the same time. Strange how "nice" the sound has become through nostalgia even though we all hated it at the time.
I'm excited are you exicted? You should be excited, why aren't you excited? If you can't tell, its time to unveil another theme for the semester! This time it's Noisemakers. And I don't mean these:
I mean it more in the literal sense of objects making noise. This probably means that most of this semester's stuff will focus on rattling things, but perhaps a flute might be made or something. The theme did largely come about because of the inherent playfulness in making an item make a sound, and because the Click Clack earrings I made to sell are so named for the noise they make swinging around.
I'll admit I haven't thought about the theme much beyond rain sticks and jingle bells and poking around on Wikipedia has just turned up wierd instruments like the Vibraslap. I blame the alternative materials project and the six trips to the craft stores it caused as a distraction. When we last left it I had finished this:
and obtained Legos to make jewelry of instead. Also, please enjoy the above poorly cropped photo of the foam flower in action.
And here's that finished piece. I can't decide on a title for it; I go between something like "Up and At 'em" or "Into the Blue" (obscure movie reference ahoy!) since there's a fighter jet at the bottom.
Look! You can even tilt the plane up slightly... Okay I'm still annoyed that I had to pay for a brand new Batman Lego set just to get the traffic light colored pieces for the earrings and the compliment I got on them was when I was buying my third shot at beads from A.C. Moore.
It's the set in question! can you guess how much it cost because of licensing?
I tried salvaging some of them into this poorly thought out necklace with the car. Now that I think about it I wish I had access to a drill this weekend so I could have drilled some of the houses and hotels from Monopoly in order to make it seem like the car is on a street around your neck, but alas. A project for another day...
Since concluding these things is a bit of a bear, for the semester I'll just post some songs and sounds I like, starting with my current favorite song from OCRemix.org.
Here is the page where you can download it for free. I have always liked upbeat video game music and this is no exception.It's also the chief reason I bought F-Zero for my SNES. Expect many songs from here and a few video game and other sound effects. Not much that it has to do with making noise, but it is a noise I like. And everyone knows listening to music while working in the studio is perhaps the most essential element! In the meantime We can sit back and reflect on how programmers got catchy tunes out of five or so available channels on the circuit board.
and make it even weirder! New semesters always start out in such a way... Right off the bat we've got an alternative materials project. I was expecting it to be a full project, and thus designed a big old piece for it:
It's this thing right here1
But it turned out that we were to be given a mystery packet of materials to use for the project, and it would be due next class (in two days) and all we had to do was make some sort of body adornment, no rings.
I wound up with this foam stuff and thought it would be alright until I tried to scrunch the red sheet into an abstract flower. It was too thick to do it so I wound up cutting petals and sewing it together. That wasnt enough so I added a yellow center out of some other foam I had, and a greenish plastic flower I found on the ground somewhere. There still wasn't enough pouf to it so after flying to the craft store,
I got some ridiculous(ly expensive) green mesh ribbon to make it completly obnoxious. The piece is about a foot or so long, and sadly unloved in our peer rating/jurying thing. Perhaps I'll use it as a Christmas ornament this year, it uses magnets to pinch a shirt between it when wearing it on the shoulder, and therefore also sticks to any metallic surface. Just don't put any electronics near it.
For our next and last go at making alternative material body adornment we got to see what was in the next set of packets, and the majority of them were Lego based. This pic has some of them in it, while the others are arranged into this:
I am liking this necklace so far, but it is so hard to not just mash the Legos together and call it a day. Similarly I'm having trouble working up the urge to ruin the little Micro Machines car, though I have no idea where I'd work it into the piece. The long Legos that make up the drop of the pendant will be spray painted light blue but beyond that who knows? I feel bad that I cannot come up with ways to use more of the materials, like I'm supposed to. Maybe matching earrings? Nothing to do but get back to it, I guess...
Dull post title but accurate! For those of you interested in owning a piece of jewelry I've got prices listed below on those ready to go. All earring posts and hooks are made of sterling silver, and the entire piece is sterling for the tube and curve designs. If there was something else you wanted from the original post showing off the pieces, don't hesitate to email me, the link for which is in my profile. And if you're not interested in these, there's a small preview after the price list of what I'm developing next.
Tube Earrings $35
Tube Necklace: $100
Triangle Earrings: $20
"Reverse" Earrings: $10
Click Clack Earrings: $15
Curve Pendant: $40
Curve Earrings: $30
For the grand preview, I have finally learned how to drill seaglass! As you can see the ear wires got quite experimental, and because of that these aren't quite ready for sale yet, but they will be soon.
The other things I am looking at for production is a few older designs to improve upon and as always using alternative materials and recycling/upcycling. Not pictured are some ideas involving the square studs from studded belts which im still working out, among other things. Stay tuned!
