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.

10% off until tomorrow!

July 7, 2013

I may have been a little too focused on celebrating July 4, because I definitely forgot to post the 10% off coupon code for my shop: use HAPPY4TH!

thinking in collections

June 28, 2013

I feel like I’m super disorganized when I go into the studio lately. When I was studying at Amalgam, that was not a bad thing — we just sort of hopped from project to project as we saw fit, and it was great!

But on my own, that sort of unguided hopping around is a recipe for danger (witness: the 400+ grams of scrap silver I sent in to Rio today. Though, to be fair, more than half was old jewelry that’s accumulated over years.). So I’m trying now to think in terms of collections built around techniques or stones or whatever. I’ve got sketches like crazy, and I’m noticing a couple of trends:

I love tube settings.
And tiny, tiny stones.
And stacking rings.
And graceful curves that require control with a saw.

So I’m going to try and use those trends to guide what I make, and see if I don’t come up with some sort of cohesive collections in the process.

so I broke six drill bits.

June 27, 2013

Good thing they were cheap?

I saw this neat thing on Pinterest the other day:

And I thought, hey, that looks like fun. I like to cross-stitch. Let’s try it. So I found a simple pattern, about 6 stitches by 6 stitches, printed it out and off to the studio I went. I figured I could use the printout to help me punch and drill my grid on the metal.

Wisely, I started with copper — it’s the cheapest metal to experiment on and I generally don’t mind if I ruin whatever I’m trying.

(Here is where I learned that manual disc punches blow. A lot. I learned instead how to use a giant gravity-assisted thing that lives in the studio, which makes punching disc after disc much, much faster. Above, I’m punching little silver discs out for earrings.)

So, I put my little grid down on a copper disc and punched all my little pilot divots (so that the drill bit doesn’t skip around on the metal) and loaded a tiny drill bit in the flex shaft. It drilled three holes, got dull, and broke. Four drill bits later I got frustrated and went nosing around the studio to see if I could find another tool to use.

Enter the drill press.

When I try this again — and I will — I will use only the drill press. It’s much more precise than the flex shaft and removes the human-unsteadiness factor.

So really, I only got as far as that busted disc at the top of the post. There are two little pieces of steel drill bit stuck in it. The grid is all over the map. It will look like absolute crap if I try to stitch it. But I have two backup discs and a whole mess of drill bits, so sometime soon I will try again.

on soldering and wasting metal

June 19, 2013

I spent an hour soldering yesterday. A full hour. And what did I have to show for it? One. Stupid. Tube. In a ring shank. Which, I might add, took all of five minutes. The remaining 55 were spent on an experiment that frustrated me beyond belief and resulted in a bunch of wasted metal, which I threw in the big pile I have to send in for refining. Rawr. On the other hand, at least I learned that the idea I’d had kicking around in my head isn’t going to work!

what I learned this week

June 15, 2013

I got over my fear of renting studio space, and signed up for a key position at Scintillant Studio in the Mission. This is my cheapest option, and it means that I have 24/7 access — as long as there isn’t a class or workshop in session. Right now, that’s perfect for what I need.

I learned some things, my first week(ish) in this new studio. The biggest thing is that while Wendy‘s teaching style is undirected, that’s a totally different thing from not actually having a teacher. I didn’t realize what a relief it was to have her right there if I felt I was going off track. Speaking of…

Don’t try to cut seats for flush-set stones without some sort of lubricant for the bur. You *will* screw up the seat, and then have to use solder in an unorthodox fashion to refill the band, thus ruining the one stone you’d already set (it predictably cracked under heat). Rawr. Also, solder oxidizes at a different rate than sterling silver, and while I cut most of it back out when I re-cut the stone seat, I’m curious to see how this ring will age.

I get really clumsy when I’m unsettled, and that is the kindest description for how I felt coming into a new studio space. I dropped several 2.5mm garnets (and never found one), upended a bag of earring posts on the floor, and couldn’t seem to grip the flex shaft’s handpiece to save my life.

HEAT CONTROL. I stil don’t really have it, as evidenced by two melted tubes and some firescale (oxidation resulting from overheating).

Also, all of my fellow artists (can I call myself an artist yet?) can be seen wearing masks when using the flex-shaft. I was never taught to use one, but I’m thinking I might start. Follow the crowd, and all that. What do these people know that I don’t? Is this a California thing?

Advice I should listen to.

May 31, 2013

So, I just relocated to San Francisco, which means that I lost the badass studio I was studying in in Atlanta, and also that I have to find a new one.

All of my stuff — including half of my tools — is in a container, in a storage facility, somewhere in California. Which means that every day, I go into the closet in my empty apartment and stare forlornly at my studio box, filled with metal and stones and deliciousness, and reaffirm that I need to get into a studio here, because I simply don’t have what I need to set up a home workbench (yet). Even my needle files are lost to me.

I think I’ve found one, but given that I’m unemployed (hey, want to help me out and buy some jewelry?) I’m hesitant to plonk down the dollars needed to get access to the heavy-duty tools I can’t fit into a storage container. And every time I hesitate, I feel like an idiot for not doing the thing that makes me happiest. I really should take the photo’s advice.

Johanna & Jesse got married!

May 8, 2013

And I made their wedding bands.

My lovely friend Johanna got in touch with me a few weeks ago about making them, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so flattered or honored in my life.

They’re very simple bands with a pumice-stone finish that makes them look sandblasted. I had a great time making them, and they’re the first pieces I’ve made truly “from scratch” — these rings started as silver that I melted down into an ingot and rolled out into thick sheet metal. Usually, I just buy the sheet ready-made.

The Process
I don’t have pictures of the melting and rolling process…suffice to say that it involved a propane-oxygen torch that scared the crap out of me, a sheet-metal form that produced the ingot, and a lot of rolling-annealing-pickling-rolling-….until I got to 14 gauge sheet metal.

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Ruby & sterling

May 5, 2013

A couple of weeks ago we had a stone vendor come in to class, and he had the most beautiful ruby teardrop. It had to be mine, no two ways about it. I originally was planning to do something I’ve had on my Pinterest boards — small, simple and clean.

[edit: it looks like my Pinterest plugin has died…another one for the bug list!]

But when I went to start the work, I realized — the ruby wasn’t as small as it was in my mind’s eye. Baby has a belly! And it would knock the balance of the ring off if I set it horizontally. Change of plans. Kind of a 180, actually — I went from a simple horizontal tube setting on a slim, hammered band to a more complicated tube setting, set vertically on a triple band of beadwire sandwiching half-round wire.

And. I. Love. It. It had its challenges — the beadwire kept snapping as I worked it, soldering it all together required more heat control than I have because of that, and cutting the seat in the band for the tube setting took forever. But it fits perfectly and it’s comfortable (we were worried that the band would be too thick with the liner I used) and I swear, the open back of the tube setting means the ruby practically glows.

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