Moldable plastic is awesome.

September 5, 2014

Last week or so I posted this picture to Instagram. As is my habit lately, I’d dismantled a ring I bought in the student union in college and wanted to reset the stones. I’ve never set princess-cut stones before, but hey, now’s as good a time as any!

These are 4mm stones. Tiny. Tiny stones require tiny settings, which aren’t inherently problematic for me. I run into problems when I’m turning those tiny settings into earrings. Tiny earrings are really, really hard to hold when you’re setting stones.

That translates to a ton of broken earring posts. This is a tool issue: I have to hold the earring by the post so that I can reach the setting to secure the stone. Using pliers, a ring clamp, or a vise means all the pressure of stone-setting is on the post itself, and the next thing you know, my setting’s on the floor and the post is still secure in the tool.

I got really, really tired of breaking off earring posts. It’s wasteful and frustrating, especially when the stone is all but set! So, to the Internet! I came across jigs and tiny vises, but they’re generally pricey and I wasn’t sure they’re what I need.

Then I remembered the time my teacher used Jett Sett to hold an oddly-shaped bezel setting in place on a bench pin. Jett Sett’s thermoplastic, meaning that it gets nice and pliable at a certain temp and then hardens as it cools. It’s also easy to clean up without leaving residue (unlike wax, which likes to get into nooks and crannies and then stay there).

However, I’m on a budget and Jett Sett was more than I wanted to spend. I did find an alternative: InstaMorph, another thermoplastic that’s half the price of Jett Sett but seemed to have the same qualities.

It’s amazing! I poured hot water over the InstaMorph in a Pyrex dish, and two minutes later I had a blob of plastic that I was able to mold over my bench pin and press the earring setting into.

Never in my life have I had such an easy time setting an earring. I was surprised by how incredibly well it worked. The InstaMorph takes a few minutes to cool, so I had time to position it just right. Once it hardened, my new tool was steady and secure and didn’t get in my way.

And the best part? This stuff’s reusable. I reheated and repositioned the plastic a few times when I was polishing the earrings without any degradation in performance. The little 6oz bag I bought should last me a good while.

In which I dip my hands in hot wax.

September 1, 2014

Happy Labor Day, everyone! I’m celebrating by working (does it count as work if you love it?), but also by taking care of my hands with a little DIY spa day.

(If you want to put me to work, you can use code LABORDAY at my Etsy shop for free shipping!)

I write a knitting blog with my pal Johanna, and a few months back I wrote a post about how maybe, just maybe, we (I) shouldn’t take our (my) hands for granted. I talked about the importance of stretching, avoiding RSI, and not using your fingers in lieu of actual tools.

I wish I could say I’ve listened to all the advice I gave myself. (Do as I say, not as I do?) I’ve started taking better care, but the major driver behind that is ache and tiredness in my fingers and wrists, plus a little vanity — I’d like for my nails to look ever-so-slightly more ladylike, and less like I’v been digging in dirt all day.

This requires one thing that is very, very hard for me. I have to STOP doing things. I don’t mean overall. I mean that for forty minutes or so at a go, I have to sit still and not do anything with my hands. Why? Because that’s enough time for nail polish to set, enough time to get a hand massage, enough time to do the silly but delightful thing I’m going to tell you about right now.

Forty minutes is enough time to give both my hands a paraffin bath.

If you’ve ever had a manicure, this might be familiar — it’s when you dip your hands into melted wax and then sit with goofy mitts on until the nice manicurist takes them off. Your muscles get the therapeutic benefit of heat, and your skin ends up nice and soft. Except to do that at a salon is around $10 a go, depending on where you get your services, and that mess adds up!

So instead of budgeting salon dollars into my monthly expenses, I bought a Dr. Scholl’s Quick Heat Paraffin Spa Bath. It comes with the goofy mitts, plus plastic liners so you don’t ruin them, 3 pounds of wax, and of course the heating pot itself. It’s dead simple: heat the wax for a couple of hours (it takes a while to melt), let it cool slightly (burns are bad, people), dip your hand, put the mitt on, and then SIT AND DO NOTHING for twenty minutes.

Ok, you can watch TV. Maybe read a book. I do one hand at a time because it’s easier that way, so I have the other free to do whatever. But since my waxy hand is effectively useless, I find that I may as well just enjoy the break and relax!

When you’re done, the wax peels off easily and leaves you with a nice moisturizing coat of oil, which I like to massage into my skin. You can reuse the wax if you like, but if you have multiple people using the bath that might be a little gross.

An upcycled amber pendant

August 28, 2014

When I was in high school, I snagged some jewelry out of my mom’s jewelry box. (Don’t worry, she knew about it.) Either her parents or my dad’s had given her an amber necklace and bracelet, which she never wore, and that I was infatuated with — particularly the focal piece of the necklace, which was a big chunk of amber.

I had wire-wrapped that chunk and wore it on a leather necklace for a while, but because amber is very light, it never sat quite right on my body. Eventually, I tossed it in with my other accessories and more or less forgot about it until a few months ago.

When I rediscovered it, I had this weirdly intense nostalgia. It was all beat up and scratched (I am not easy on my jewelry), but I remembered Mom giving it to me, and telling me how my grandparents had given it to her. I was determined to re-set it into something that would both protect and showcase the stone.

First things first: I had to polish the poor, beat-up amber.
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This is ‘work’

August 18, 2014

And so I take the appropriate precautions, because I’d like to be around for a really long time to do this work. Inhaling polishing compounds and silver dust isn’t exactly conducive to robust health.

I wasn’t really trained to wear a respirator in the studio. My first teacher, the excellent Jesse Bert wasn’t a huge fan of polishing compounds when he taught me, so we never covered the subject. (He did, however, teach me how to properly light an oxy/acetylene torch without lighting things on fire or creating a ton of ash.) My next teacher, the brilliant Wendy Tonsits of Amalgam Arts Atlanta is big on safety — no open-toed shoes, hair tied back, safety glasses — but for whatever reason, masks weren’t something we ever discussed.

I think it might be a California thing. In this state, everything is covered in “might cause cancer” warnings, and there seems to be a law or regulation for pretty much everything. So I noticed that the jewelers at Scintillant were wearing masks, and thought, huh, I maybe should get some of those.

Then I forgot about it, until recently when I started doing tons of polishing again. I’d come home and notice that the whole front of my upper body was covered in rouge dust — and I’m talking down to the skin. I stained a couple of bras. I’d wash my face and the water would run red, even if my skin wasn’t visibly dirty. This stuff is very, very fine. NOT GOOD.

It made me wonder how much was getting into my lungs. Not even just rouge or tripoli — I use silicone-carbide wheels in the flex-shaft, and that also creates tons of dust. I’m lucky that it hasn’t triggered asthma or otherwise made me sick.

So I bought masks. Actually, even knowing what a mess I was making, Gavin had to yell at me before I bought masks. I don’t know what the hell my problem was. It’s not even like they’re expensive! I bought 3M 9211 Cool-Flow N95 Particulate Sanding Respirators, which are rated N95, which means that they filter 95% of airborne particulates. So, in theory, I’m inhaling 95% less garbage when I work.

I don’t like wearing the mask, hence my expression in the picture. It does horrifying things to my hair and fogs up my glasses if I don’t put it on exactly right. Plus, for all that it has that “cool valve,” it’s still a little stuffy in there.

But all of that is one hell of a lot better than ruining my lungs.

So, about that recycled silver (on drawing down wire)

August 14, 2014

I’m kind of proud that I made the wire to make this bracelet.

I had a goal in mind, other than saving some cash, when I started recycling silver, and that was a bracelet I’ve had dancing in my head for probably three years. This bracelet requires several feet of (roughly) 18 gauge sterling wire, which I didn’t have in my kit at the moment I decided to try making the bracelet.

So I melted scrap down and made ingots, but ingots are a long, long way from 18 gauge wire. Of course, there’s a way to get there. It involves lots of fire, heavy tools, and patience. One of the things I love about Scintillant is that it provides me with at least the fire and the heavy tools!

The studio also has a bunch of people who know way, way more than I do. (How often I feel like a complete amateur in there is fodder for another time.) I’ve already learned that my two previous teachers are decidedly old-school, in that they taught me how to do everything the hard way, with the idea that I’d eventually be able to handle myself doing things the easy way — that is, with aggressive tools that will ruin a project in the space it takes to blink just as often as they’ll speed up the work.

To get from ingot to wire, you roll the ingot down in a roll mill fitted with wire plates. (Roll, anneal, pickle, dry, roll, anneal, pickle, dry…) Once you’ve reached the smallest groove on the mill, it’s time to move to the steel draw plates, which have progressively smaller holes, through which you force metal to make it smaller.

Doing it the hard way: hand-filed wire in the death grip of a pair of pliers, waiting for me to pull with all my strength.

There are two ways draw plates can be “the hard way.” The first is that you have to file the tip of your metal down to a very small point, which can then be poked through the plate and grabbed with a heavy-duty plier. Filing by hand is time-consuming and taxing on your fingers. The second is that once you’ve succeeded in grabbing the wire with the pliers, you then have to exert a great amount of force to pull the wire through the plate. For me, it feels like I’m playing tug-of-war with Drax the Destroyer. And losing.

Enter two badass tools, and the easy way. The first of those tools eliminates the need to file by hand. Behold, the belt sander!

Fitted with a wet/dry sanding belt, it makes short work of filing a point on metal of any gauge. Wear goggles and watch your fingers — the speed with which the belt sander works means it’s easy to lose your grip, and the metal gets very hot due to the friction.

The second tool is this weird-looking bad boy (ignore the Photoshop and focus on the awesome tool).

It’s called a draw bench, and I had no idea it was a thing until one of my fellow makers showed me how to use it. Draw benches use a wheel and a belt to draw wire through the plate, reducing the amount of physical force you have to exert by, oh, ALL OF IT. Seriously, you go from tug-of-war with a superhero to easily turning a wheel with one hand. Yay, physics!

Scintillant’s draw bench is a handmade deal that has a few idiosyncracies — for example, the draw plate sort of just sits in a slot. It’s meant to have clamps to hold it in place, but for whatever reason we don’t have them. This means it’s kind of a balancing act to grip the wire with the pliers and put enough tension on the belt to begin the draw (which is why there’s no photo of that stage). Not enough tension, and the whole thing fails to work.

The other catch is that at the end of the draw, when the wire leaves the plate, all the tension that the bench uses to work is released suddenly, which can fling your metal across the room and send the very heavy pliers swinging. After a couple of attempts, I learned to mitigate this effect by moving slowly, which gave me time to catch the pliers at the end of the draw.

In the end, I spent about six hours recycling silver and drawing five feet of sterling wire down. Easily half of that time was spent in the initial rolling stage, because the metal has to be annealed and pickled more frequently to keep it from cracking. Had I not learned how to use the draw bench, it probably would have taken me a couple hours more to make the wire I needed…and that’s not how I want to spend my time!

On recycling silver

August 11, 2014

Top to bottom: sterling scrap collection, scrap in charcoal block with flux, fire! an acetylene torch on high heat, and the red-hot end result.

In high school and college, I worked in a Houston-area bead shop, where I learned how to wrap all kinds of things in sterling silver wire.

Fast-forward a decade or so, and I have a massive collection of silver-wired jewelry that I don’t wear, or has gotten hideously out of style, or is broken. I’ve been carrying it around with me from city to city, apartment to house to apartment. It’s useless in this form, so the other night I cut it all up.

That little exercise left me with a sizeable pile of sterling silver bits. I figured I’d add it to the scrap I have from bench work, which I’d planned to sell back to Rio Grande for credit.

And then it occurred to me — this is clean scrap, without solder or other metals mixed in. It doesn’t need to be refined. There was absolutely no reason that I couldn’t melt the stuff down myself and reuse it. I’ve always hesitated to do this without guidance from a teacher, because of the incredibly high heat involved and my lack of experience with the process. But in reality, it’s very, very simple.

Here’s a rundown (pictured above):
1. Collect scrap in a charcoal block (or a crucible, if you have one). Place the block in an annealing pan or otherwise heat-proof surface. It’s about to get hot in here!
2. Add flux or borax, to clean the metal of oxides and dirt. I scraped some flux into the scrap pile, and that worked well.
3. Light up a torch with a large tip. My understanding is that you need a propane torch or oxy/acetylene if you want to alloy gold, because they get so. much. hotter. But for sterling and in the amounts I was working with, Scintillant’s air-fed acetylene torch does the job. Turn that sucker up high, high, high. You want a big, hot flame.
4. Focus the flame on the charcoal block full of scrap, and go.
5. The silver will get really shiny, and then start to melt onto itself. Metal has a natural propensity to ball up when molten, which is exactly what I aimed for — a bright-red, round(ish) ball of molten metal.
6. Let cool, at least a little bit, because you’ll find (as I did) that if you poke the red-hot ball of molten metal that you can dimple the surface. Then pick it up carefully using tweezers and quench it.
7. Pickle. Congratulations, you’ve recycled silver!

L to R: a lightly hammered ingot, ingot rolled in a roll mill with wire plates, silver immediately after firing, in ball form.

I played around a little with my recycled silver — I made some stud earrings and a ring, which I’m really, really happy with.

I also learned that charcoal blocks are super soft, and you can carve into them to form moulds. Someone had beat me to this — one of the studio’s blocks had a wire-shaped channel in it. I melted scrap directly in the form (as opposed to pouring it in) to form an ingot, which I hammered into shape and eventually put through the studio’s roll mills to form wire and sheet.

I can use those in other pieces instead of having to buy new metal! It’s an intensive process that I’ll save for another post, but it’s nice to know I can recover my own silver.

(Grand)mama necklaces

September 11, 2013

Hello world (that I pretend is reading this…)!

I recently was granted a pair of privileges: my cousin, M, who just had the most beautiful baby girl, wanted to give her mother a gift to thank her for her help during the last month of her pregnancy. She asked me to make her mother a necklace with the names of her three grandchildren, and I was super thrilled at the chance.

Not long after, M’s husband called me. He wanted me to make another necklace, in a particular style, for her. Yes, he could have just ordered it from the inspiration-giver (I take no design credit on this one, that’s for sure), but part of the gift was that *I* made it.

I think I will offer the style I made for my aunt’s necklace for sale — I had a lot of fun with the stamps and the finishes and the simplicity of it all.

Oh, and baby girl? AG is a little ball of gorgeousness. I’m looking forward to seeing her (and her big brother) grow up.

A new trick: basket settings

August 13, 2013

I love stone settings. I can set using bezels, tubes and flush settings, and I do so often, but the other day I got a little…bored, for lack of a better word.

So I decided to teach myself how to set stones in basket settings, using The Complete Metalsmith as a guide. It has shiny step-by-step instructions, but left out a few key details…as in, instead of explaining how to cut the seat for the stone, it assumes you already know how. That led me to a little Googling, because in theory I do know how…for other types of settings.

A basket setting is pretty much exactly what it sounds like — you create a little basket that you solder into the base of your piece — in this case, a ring shank.
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I’ve been doing it backwards!

July 24, 2013

Today’s discovery falls into an are-you-kidding-me moment. I’ve been making earrings like the ones in the photo (available on my Etsy shop, by the way) using the following steps:

1. Use tiny tube cutter to slice off a small section of tube. True both ends.
2. Solder earring post onto backside of tube (or onto a plate, which then gets soldered onto the tube)
3. Stick the whole mess in a pin vise.
4. Cut the seat. Put too much pressure on the solder join.
5. Inevitably, break off the post and have to re-solder.
6. Set the stone. Return to step 5, possibly.

If I was lucky, I’d only have to resolder once. What’s funny is that more than one professional jeweler has watched me do this, and said absolutely nothing about my process. So I figured it was the way to go, until today I started looking for alternate ways to hold the tubing so that I wouldn’t shatter the join.

At which point, I learned that I’M DOING IT WRONG.

According to this article at Ganoksin, I should be cutting the seat for the stone FIRST, and then cutting it off and soldering it to the earring posts before setting the stone.

It’s brilliant, and I’ll be trying that technique this weekend.

Well, I’ve branded my fingertips

July 9, 2013

I had such a clear plan when I went into the studio this morning. The pendant part of the necklace in the sketch above requires a bottom plate, a backing plate, two prongs and two jump rings. That’s five solder connections, all told. No – wait – seven, because the jump rings had to first be soldered to the pendant and then soldered closed to hold chain. I figured the backing plate would be the most difficult of all the joins, just because it’s a weird shape and I wasn’t sure how to set myself up. Turns out, it was the easiest one.

The prongs kept melting off. I’d get one in place, go to solder the other, and the first would wilt like cheap flowers in sunshine. So I’d pull both off and go again. And again. And again. Finally I figured out that my torch was too hot, so I switched tips and got both prongs where I wanted them.

You’d think I was going backwards with my solders, but nooooo I was using easy solder with the jump rings. And they kept falling off. Or melting. Or both. I got them both onto the plate, then I’d go to close the gap and find myself with a puddle of yuck. I once even melted the chain.

I think my mistake is trying to do two joins on the single jump ring with one type of solder, or even just doing two joins. When next I take a crack at this, I think I’ll be sliding the chain onto the ring and then soldering the gap onto the plate, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Why’d I stop today? Because I got so frustrated that I stopped paying attention to what I’d already heated, picked up the pendant by the very hot prongs and now have two lovely, 20-gauge burns on my thumb and first finger.

I am really, really frustrated with myself and my soldering abilities right now.