...Than I can possibly chew at one time, I've reorganized some priorities to bring you the process of making my latest jewelry piece.
We begin with forging the lower half of my necklace out of quarter inch copper rod as they are just about to be annealed again for more hammering.
Once I shaped and drilled the ends of the piece I riveted them together. Some how I always wind up having to rivet on top of a dapping punch since the pieces have just enough of a curve that a flat anvil or bench block won't work.
Because I learned my lesson with the Pac-man necklace about how rigid riveted pieces are the top half of the this one is a normal chain that I twisted into a sort of curb chain, which doesn't lay right with the rest of the piece but eh live and learn? Also notice that you cannot see the solder seams on the chain since I used a copper solder I got from the Rochester gem show. It's a lot like low temperature silver solder and actually flows with out using flux. It means however its easier to stick feed it than to use pallions. Still want to get more of it and keep experiementing with it though.
Here's how everything starts to line up so far for the necklace. Once the chain was attached and the clasp made and put on it was time to start adding the plastic.
I had to have help slicing the tubing since there are difficulties involved in running it through power saws. After that it was time to begin fitting the pins that hold the plastic to the metal necklace.
While I started working on the plastic part of the necklace the Nor'easter Iron Conference was happening, specifically they were doing their big 1,000 pound iron pour outside next to the jewelry studio. Such a lovely smell from the coke furnace, indeed.
By now I have the top and bottom circles fitted to the plastic rings and its time to start gluing.
Gluing even with some practice proved to be messier than I had anticipated but here are the pieces half assembled and filled halfway with aquarium gravel, some Monopoly houses, miniature dice, and random key knockouts plus tiny rhinestones.
Look at that glorious strat-o-sheen shine! Anyway, not only does the gravel make a falling water sound it looks a lot like flood water especially with houses floating in it. The dice represents the chance of rain since the whole necklace is supposed to be a modern tribal attempting to summon the rain kinda thing.
Here it is finished! Photographed on the world's worst background in the vent where I glued it together with quite caustic acrylic cement. It's not as wonderful as I hoped and I haven't had a chance to try it for weight since I have been letting it to cure for a full 24 hours but at least it's finished and ready for a likely brutal critique.
And there was one more benefit to the glue practice, expect to see this piece as a background enviroment in CAD which the entirety of my Thanksgiving break will be spent doing in attempt to bring that project to fruition.
Non sequitur noise time, how about another Cyriak animation, Welcome to Kitty City?
Its amazing what some people can do with a copy of Photoshop, After Effects, and Fruity Loops while I continue to look askance at Illustrator, but the Adobe Suite and I are getting along better now, thanks for asking.
Let us discuss fibers for a moment since I've been having rather unsually successful results in my fibers II class, at least when compared to the minor disaster of fibers I.
Way back in October I completed a woven shibori scarf which is where you weave a scarf on a loom with supplemental warp thread (the dark purple strings here).
You can also remove some of the strings as I did here. Small note, this actually began as plain undyed cotton thread, but I dyed everything blue before the next step:
which is to pull all the shibori strings tight to create a resist for dying:
then dye it purple over the blue and start cutting out the shibori strings and open the scarf up.
And the final scarf which I liked for its very NES Metroid colors even though I was aiming for more of an SNES F-zero look.
Just to prove it here's a screenshot of Samus arriving in Norfair in the aforementioned Metroid game. The game itself is a long, huge, lonely, and difficult side scrolling trek through an alien planet which I never quite got the hange of since I prefer more shooty arcade like games.
November's project was largely to do devore on a couple of velevet scarfs, devore being an oldish technique to burn out some of the velvet in various patterns leaving open spaces of the silk base fabric. This project we had famous Buffalo buildings assigned to us to go with Runway 6.0's theme of City Bits/ City Bytes and the college's Year of the City thing. What annoys me about Year of the City is that it got more attention than last year's Year of the Arts, but I digress.
The point is I got the Albright Knox Art Gallery, that most Neoclassical of public buildings with the obligatory art museum ugly 1960s additon. I got some very good exterior shots of it at night for inspiration: the middle one reminding me very much of the landmark first person shooter Goldeneye 64.
Of the patterns I created to use for this project, I wound up using one based on the Ionic columns throughout the building seen here on the left velvet sample and another one one based on the folds of the caraytids on the rear exterior of the building.
Here are the rest of my lovely samples of burnt out velvet. I don't know whether I've just improved that much from fibers I to fibers II (my weaving certainly has) but I really liked how well the dying came out on these samples. Though like the woven shibori project my samples came out a bit better than the actual finals.
This is one of them, which I still like even though it was supposed to turn out more like the top left sample in the group of nine above. My other scarf was supposed to look like the pink sample to the left of the image but as you can tell below:
It didnt. Instead of scarlet with stripes of a color that can only be described as mulberry, I wound up with scarlet and nothing else until I freaked out, scrunched it up, and dunked in black dye for a half hour and got this. I'm still rather lukewarm about it but I didn't want to mess it up even further, and thankfully the professor seemed to like it as is.
While I meditate on what to do for the deconstructive screen printing process that is the next assignment here's today's musical interlude. I considered posting the background music to Norfair but it's one of the more boring songs from Metroid's bass heavy soundtrack when there are better tunes like this one. I also was going to post the classic Goldeneye Gets Down video (caused by the crooked cartridge trick) until I discovered its audio had been taken out by copyright claim.
So I am left with the excellent soundtrack ripped straight from the Cosmic Wars, a real time stategy space sim that never made it out of Japan. I tried playing it once but was immediately bored by the fact it is an RTS game. But it is made by Konami, a company know for having some great sound tracks and this one s quite nice to listen to.
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.
