The Best Laid Plans...

Oh positive thoughts, if only you were able to manifest so easily!

In my last post, I was SO excited to have a week in the studio. I should have known better. Just when I think I'll get a handle on things, some sort of monkey wrench gets tossed in and the whole plan falls apart.

I won't bore you with the details. I'll just say that my output last week was so much less than I'd planned or hoped for. But at least there was some output. Here's the evidence:

Crescendo necklace and earrings, turquoise

Yes, at least some of the twenty-odd bezels I made last week got all the way through the stone setting process. And I love the way they turned out. The pendant gave me fits at first, but I'm so pleased with the end result. I love the contrast between light and dark in these stones, and wanted the embellishments to reflect that. The earrings don't have room for as much embellishment, of course, but they echo the movement and upward curvings of wire on the necklace.

And then, this:

A lovely Deschutes jasper from Oregon. Deschutes is not easy to come by (nor inexpensive), since the "dig site" is no longer active. I've had this stone for a while, and decided to give it a proper setting. And I like it so much that I may have to go hunting for a few more Deschutes cabs when I'm in Tucson next year...

I don't buy a lot of round stone cuts, because I think they're sort of boring. But this was more about the patterns of the stone, rather than the shape. And of course I wanted to contrast the smoothness of the stone with some pointy asymmetrical embellishments. It's also a bigger stone - and bigger embellishments - than I normally use. But I'm thrilled with the result.

Also, the next mosaic piece is on the way...most of the mosaics are soldered on and it's probably two-thirds of the way finished. Not including making the chain...I love the handmade chains when they're finished, but I don't love the actual process of constructing them. And I'm trying to do something a little different with the connections this time...I'll show you all of it once that baby's done.  :) 

Gratifying Results (the Obstacles Are the Path).

That post I wrote last week on pushing myself and learning new tricks? I didn't have the pieces I made quite finished when I wrote it. But they are now...so I'd like to show them to you.   :)

The first piece, that gave me SO much grief, is this one:

Tales and Trails Ring

It's wide, nearly an inch wide, and thick gauge sterling. And I shaped and soldered those swirls...or THOUGHT I'd soldered them...but they kept. falling. off.

Now, I have struggled with soldering "not taking" before...primarily with joining two items side by side, which is why I made quite a few of these designs:

because all the pieces on the top get soldered side to side. So now I'm fairly proficient at that.  :)  Struggling with something? Try making fifty pieces that use the technique you're struggling with. That'll make you improve.  :) 

So. Usually soldering something on top of something else is not a problem. But...joining on a curved surface is *so* not the same as joining on a flat surface...I forgot one of the Basic Rules of Fabrication:

You Need A Good Join. Solder Will Not Flow to Fill A Gap.

(Actually, solder *will* flow to fill a gap...but a very small gap). In the case of this ring, I wasn't getting very good joins. Chalk it up to impatience, inexperience, just generally being clueless that day, but for some reason I thought that if I just had *part* of the swirls touching the ring base, the solder would take care of the rest. I'd sort of "tack" down the swirls and then go back and hit the parts that hadn't soldered.

FAIL.

What ultimately had to happen was that I went back and re-shaped the swirls (which took more time, but it would have been less time overall if I hadn't done it wrong to begin with) so that all parts of them laid flat on the curved surface. It wasn't easy. And now I can see why some handmade rings are made...well, let's say differently.  :)

The other piece I made, which also presented a challenge, was this ring:

Terrain Ring 

I've been wanting to make rings with the mosaic designs for a while, but soldering all those pieces onto a curved surface isn't easy either! But it's not all about easy in the studio; otherwise everyone would be doing it.  :)   I helped myself a little by Euro-square-ing the ring base before starting to solder the embellishments on top of it:

source

This ring mandrel is squared, as the photo shows. Most ring mandrels are round, but sometimes, especially with a wider band, a squared ring shape will be more comfortable on the finger. Also, if you're making a ring with a heavy top or a big stone set on top, a square shape will help keep the top of the ring upright, rather than the shank sliding around the finger. 

So I squared the mosaic ring. Which at least gave me a partially flat surface to solder the silver pieces on to. Though they're not quite ALL on the square part...since I did three "stations" of mosaics, each station drifts off to the side a bit. But the overall ring is balanced.  :)

AND comfortable. Always important in jewelry design.   :)

A Grander Plan: Designing a Series

I've been working on honing not just my technical skills, but my design skill as well. And this month, I took on a design series. Instead of designing one or two pieces that complemented each other, I designed...twenty-four.

That is a LOT OF METALWORKING! I am tired. My body aches. B-u-t I have twenty-four stone-set pieces that complement one another. 

I did make it a little easy on myself because I had bought a good quality of  Red Creek Jasper stones this winter, and they usually can be a little mix-and-match-y to begin with. And I was playing around with a new design feature, which transferred well among the stones. I'd started sampling it with single-color stones, and I liked it...but it's subtle, and I felt like it needed some more vibrant stones to accentuate.

So I sorted my stones into groups with similar patterns:

Canyon Sunsets Series

 

I made the bezels, textured the backs (the back of each piece in each grouping has the same texture), and then the fun started. I played around with wire, tiny silver discs, even tinier silver balls, and jump ring placement (for attaching ear wires and neck chains), until I had the designs worked out. Then I moved on to the next series:

Arroyo Carvings Series

And repeated the process. Different back texture, but assorted dots and lines and discs on the top and sides.

And once more:

Desert Vistas Series

Voila! Several groupings of mix and match designs. Any pendant could go with any earrings in the series.

I really enjoyed working on these, and I also managed (a twofer!) to refine my skill in joining pieces of metal together like this. I've been able to solder a join on a single piece of metal easily, and I can sweat solder pretty well, but I've struggled with this kind of work for a while. And since nearly every piece (the curved wire, the discs, the balls, and the jump rings) all have to be "side-soldered", for lack of a better term, I think I've improved my abilities just a wee bit. Which was actually part of the plan to begin with.  :)

Now that these are finished, priced, and listed on line, next week I'm going to be working on some more "Capital A" Artisan pieces. Can't wait!

Stepping Forward

 2013 is my year of new adventures. So I'm starting off with one thing that is scary to me:  I've signed up for an "intermediate-advanced" jewelry fabrication course.

Here's the description:

"Jewelry and Metalsmithing students who have already learned the basics and work independently will learn the tips only a professional can teach how to get gallery quality results in less time. With a small class size, students receive personalized attention for their specific needs in design, advanced fabrication, clasps, stone setting, touches of gold, production techniques, rolling mill, tool maintenance, soldering tips and tricks, wax carving for casting, metalsmithing techniques and other demos that students request. Most students work on their own designs with an emphasis on one or more of the demos shown during class."

Sounds good, no? Then why am I nervous about it? Because it's pushing me out of my comfort zone. Right now I have a small stock of things I can do (almost) without thinking about them. I did say "almost".  :)  Over the past year, I've gotten comfortable with quite a few techniques. Now I want to start learning SO many more, but it means beginning at the bottom of the skill set again.

I also want to understand design better, and add my own "voice" or style more into what I create. So I'm a bit anxious, but looking forward to creative challenges!

Circle of Love Necklace

This pendant was definitely a challenge for me. I don't often design in concentric ways, or in symmetrical shapes. But I was intrigued by the idea of taking the jagged mosaic bits and keeping them within the boundaries of a circular shape. This pendant required a LOT of finagling to make sure the pieces were equidistant from the center of the circle, and from each other, and also that they formed a rounded shape on the outer ring. 

I also set the garnet so that the bottom overlaps into the inner circle, but I didn't solder it to the back plate fully:

it's hard to see against the dark stone, but the bottom of the garnet is supported only by the outer bezel and has no back plate inside the circle. A bit challenging to set as I raised the stone, but it wanted to "tip" over toward that open bottom when I set it. I'm not sure I'll do it again, but it was a satisfying challenge.  :)

Anyhoo, I went to class tonight and it was better than I imagined. Better than I could have imagined. I suspect it will be most beneficial and I will be counting the hours until next week when I get to go "be a sponge" (as my husband says) once again. I'm so ready for all this learning and I think it will be a career-defining - or at least very career-enhancing - choice.  :)

One last photo, because you can't see that yummy red garnet color in the first two!

A Backward Glance (and a New Idea)

Back in the summer of 2010, when I was really starting to use the torch on a semi-regular basis, I set myself a goal: learn to solder small jump rings. I had fount it relatively easy to solder larger pieces and thicker jump rings, but most of my "joining" rings were 18 gauge silver and I melted nearly as many as I soldered. Or I ended up with a big solder blob and would have to sand it off later (trust me, soldering blobs off of eentsy rings is not a fun job. There's no room to hold anything and you end up sanding your fingers half of the time).

For reference, 18 gauge is about 1mm thick. 1 MM, not 1 cm. It's pretty darned small. A stack of 18 gauge jump rings should give you a good visual:

So I started trying to solder them closed..I .must have soldered a hundred or so. And I still wasn't very consistent. So I decided to give myself a break and jump up to 16 gauge rings instead. 16 gauge is only one size larger but it makes a difference (or at least, it did for me). I had some scraps of wire lying around, and I laid them out with the jump rings in different patterns to see what would happen (at this point in my soldering skill set *I* was not in control of what would happen, so I spent a lot of time "winging it").

And after a lot of putting shapes together, taking them apart, and moving them around, I ended up with this:

and this:

 

They had this sort of watery, cascading effect, and in fact, that's what they ended up being called: the Cascade series. I went to my casting company and had the designs (nine in all) cast for me. And thus began a whole new problem...clean up. Cleaning up these castings was a long, tedious, drawn-out affair. And I was relatively new to cleaning up castings, so I didn't know what I was doing, so they were just a mess for me. They turned out all right, and sold moderately well, but I learned a big lesson from the experience. I haven't made anything like them since.  :)

But now it's late 2012!  I've been at the fabrication process pretty steadily for almost three years, instead of eight months, and I receive a request for a custom order: a big circular necklace based on one of the Cascade designs. I received the request around the 8th of December, and I hesitated. Busiest time of the year, and a custom order for something that had caused me a lot of grief in the past...I wasn't sure I wanted to tackle it. I well remembered the days (yes, days) spent moving little bits of sterling around to create a balanced design with the original pieces. I wasn't sure if I could actually make the piece work in the time allotted (holiday shipping and all). But I went ahead and accepted the offer. And you know what? It was...well, not easy...but much easier than the original pieces had been - both the design and the fabrication work. And the clean up was quicker! (though that might have been because I only cleaned up one piece this time...doing twenty in a row might have made me think it was just as bad as before). 

I really am thrilled at how the finished piece turned out, and it's given me a design idea as well (I'll share more about that later):

It's circular yet the inside is asymmetrical, and I feel like the dots add a bit more "oomph" to the overall design. There's no bail to connect it to a chain or anything, because the customer will supply her own, so I only had to make the pendant itself.  It's fabricated with thicker wire than my original designs because of the size, and I'm telling you - bigger is better. It's a bit under two inches across, has a nice heft to it.

And it's nice to see some real progression in my work - almost everything I'm doing right now is coming pretty easily to me, which tells me it's time to tackle some new projects, some more advanced techniques, and some more intricate designs. I'm ready for a whole new year to learn, grow, and improve my skills.  :)

When it Counts

Practice, as the old saying goes, makes perfect. And in jewelry fabrication, just like anything else, practice is necessary to get consistently good. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule indicates that it takes about a decade to become great. Great, not just consistently good.

That means that I'm a little less than a third of the way, on my path to achieving greatness (and of course "greatness", like prosperity, wealth, happiness, is personally subjective). I wish I'd started earlier (don't we always) but it's really amazing to me how much my skill set has changed even in roughly 30 months.

This? Could. Not. Have. done this when I first began to fabricate:

What used to happen when I turned on the torch was that I'd stick some solder where I thought it should be, heat up the metal and...hope for the best. I'd had the classes, listened to the instruction, written copious notes, but all of that was no substitute for actually *doing* the task.

So sometimes the solder would go where I wanted it to. Sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it flowed the wrong way and I had to file it off. Sometimes it flowed the wrong way and I couldn't clean it off without ruining the piece. A good friend of mine told me, "You can clean up or you can cover up". Sometimes covering up is the better option, but sometimes covering up doesn't work. And you can't really clean up a textured surface without losing the texture. 

Sometimes I thought the solder flowed, but I couldn't really tell. And when I picked up the item from the soldering brick, the join wasn't actually joined. Or the two pieces that were supposed to be soldered together...weren't. I spent a LOT of time working on joining two separate pieces of metal together. My own personal mountain, that.  :)

I couldn't tell when the metal was ready, heat-wise, for the solder to flow and overheated a number of pieces. I melted some, too. I ruined some designs because of solder flowing in the wrong direction and had to remake them. The scrap jar was full of wasted metal.

But little by little, I began to notice that things...worked. And they were working on the first try (um...usually). The designs got smarter - and by this I don't mean that I am making such brilliant designs, but that I designed to incorporate less clean up (thus less labor cost) and figured out what worked and what didn't. What I could do more efficiently. How to make fabrication work for me. Because everyone has their own issues, their own preferences, their own ways of fabricating. The basics remain the same, but the ways we do them are individual to each of us.

And now, with these more complex pieces, these new designs that make me finally feel like I am doing something new and different in the jewelry world, these pieces that are so far from the simple pieces I first made, I feel like I am peeking over the wall and catching a glimpse of the view on the other side. And that feels SO good. Especially for a girl who was fairly convinced that she'd never get there.

So when it counts, as it does when I'm making these pieces:

I'm glad that I've put the time in and had all of that physical learning, all of the the trials and errors, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to execute these. It would have been an exercise in frustration and I think I would have felt like such a loser. But now I'm able to design and create things that are so much cooler than I ever thought I could. And that's worth ALL the time and effort it took to get here.  :)

Anatomy of Fabrication

Ever wonder what goes into a piece of handmade jewelry? I thought I'd document a piece in action and show you. Of course the steps / processes will vary depending on what's being made...but here's what goes into a fairly " basic" cabochon design for me.

First, the stone needs a bezel. Stones, like anything natural, vary widely Some are quite tall (high), others can be very low. Bezel wire comes in various heights to accommodate the different stone heights.

This is a Peruvian opal getting its bezel made:

The bezel wire gets wrapped around the stone and measured to fit. Then the wire is shaped to the stone and the ends are soldered together:

I didn't take a picture of the bezel right after soldering, but the above shot is after it's soldered (if you look closely you can see the solder seam just in the front, toward the "bottom" of the photo). The next step is sanding the bezel to fit the back plate. The two pieces must join evenly for the solder to flow and hold them both together.

But hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself.  :)

Before the bezel can be soldered to the back plate, there must BE a back plate. So:

The back of the settting is made from  sheet metal, meaning literally that - it comes in the form of a sheet. This is a rimless design, meaning that the back plate and the bezel will meet each other with no extra back plate to be seen around the stone. I trace on the metal with a Sharpie, tracing around the bezel and stone, then use a saw to cut out the shape.

Here's the cut out piece from the sheet. I've marked the top and the next step will be to texture the back and add my maker's mark and the metal content:

 

I have textured the backs but not yet added the blue piranha and .925 (sterling silver) stamps.

Now that the sheet is ready (cut out, textured, stamped) and the bezel is ready (shaped, soldered, sanded), it's time to put them together:

This is the back plate and bezel ready for soldering. The small pieces inside the bezel are the solder bits. I will heat this up and flow the solder all around the bezel and sheet to join them.

But before I do that, I will have checked and double-checked and triple-checked my bezel to be sure it still fits my stone! All the sanding can get the bezel out of shape, so it's crucial to check and re-check that the stone still fits in it before it's soldered down to the sheet. I did *not* remember to do this on one of my very first pieces. and let me tell you...I won't forget it ever again. Nothing like doing all the work and then getting to the last step - the stone setting - and realizing you can't put your stone into your bezel...some choice words MAY have been used in the studio that day.  :)

Checking the fit:

Looks good so far. So I went ahead and soldered.  :)

Ta-dah! 

 

The next step is cutting away the excess back plate (there's always a bit of overlap since I Sharpie-traced around both the stone and bezel. Better too much than too little! Too little means that you have to start over. I didn't take a photo of cutting away the excess sheet because it's just filing until the edges of sheet and bezel are smoothed out.

Once the excess sheet is gone, this earring needs to hang somehow, so I soldered on a jump ring:

And now it's ready for clean up and then the final step, setting the stone.

No photos of the stone setting process because my hands were busy setting (stone setting is a very phyisical process - you have to use a LOT of pressure to close that bezel around the stone) but these are the tools I use:

This is the pusher. It's used to push the bezel wall in toward the stone.

This is the rocker. The little T-shaped part on the front gets rocked around the bezel once the pushing work is done. While the pusher is used in small incremental steps around the bezel, the rocker is used in a continuous motion.

And finally, the burnisher. I love burnishing but it is SO hard on my hands! It requires a LOT of pressure when you use it. This tool is in a smoothing motion around the bezel too. It gives a shine to the bezel metal and also a nice "lip" around the stone. It has a curved tip so you can really get an angle on the bezel:

And the final result:

See how the bezel curves over the top of the stone? That's the "lip" I'm talking about.

So that's the basics of fabricating a bezel setting. It's fairly time consuming to set stones (not including the design time involved before any metal gets touched) so now you know what keeps me working those long studio hours. I don't mind though. The results are worth it.  :)

Roller Coaster..woo hoo hoo :)

I spent Wednesday working in my studio, beginning the game plan for the four day, Michigan show next month. I just found out that I will be exhibiting (I had been on the wait list), and I'm feeling simultaneously excited and maybe a little panicked. I need a lot of inventory. The first three days the show is open from 10-9 (uh, YEAH, you read that right) and the last day, 10-6. It's grueling and I need to have quite a bit of jewelry. So I hit the bench hard. My plan is to make the "tough" stuff - cab work and one of a kinds - early on, then switch to the less demanding items as the show date gets closer. Also, I am planning to use July and August to revamp my design aesthetic and push myself more to create more exciting jewelry...not that what I'm doing now isn't exciting. But I am really wanting to create some fabulous metalworked items.

So I spent seven hours in the studio Wednesday, ruined two pieces, redid one, and one was redone on Thursday. Right now I have a total of two earring designs and three pendant designs. Two of the pendants are not finished yet - no bails, no embellishments, and one earring had to be remade. It doesn't seem like quite enough...they all have to be cleaned up and polished and the stones set as well...!

Somewhere deep inside me the panic rumbles. 

I would have worked for at least another hour on Wednesday but my hands, neck, and shoulders hurt. By 6 pm they hurt enough that I knew to stop for the night. And then I couldn't sleep. Just laid in bed, simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted. Wanting to push, wanting to run, but knowing it would have to wait.

Quick snap of the pieces from Wednesday. Upper row are two pendants. Bottom row are two earrings (not a pair, just one of each) and another pendant. 

Thursday was an afternoon full of appointments and errands, so I knocked off two hours worth of work in the early morning. Redid the ruined earring, added embellishments and a bail to one pendant. Now to figure out what embellishments I want on the third pendant. I had a plan, but as often seems to happen, it shifts in the time between sketch and fabrication work. And a new plan takes time to develop.

Here are the stones as well - upper level left to right, Pietersite and Larimar. Lower level Peruvian opal, ocean jasper, and a yummy boulder turquoise. 

Now it's Friday afternoon and I had jewelry class this morning (I signed up for another ten weeks at the Spruill Center, so I'm working through a few hours this afternoon. I really enjoy the jewelry classes but each week they cut one of my work days in half, so I have to manage my time well when I'm taking classes.

The week's schedule and studio time:

Monday - got home from Nashville at 1:30 a.m. Slept in until about nine, napped on the couch, dinked around the house a bit. NOT a work day. But after nearly three weeks straight of work and travel, I don't feel guilty about it.  :)

Tuesday - exercise. Unload car. Two loads of laundry. A couple of hours with the sketchbook and my stones, detailing out designs. Online research. Grocery store run.

Wednesday - exercise. Then all studio, all day.

Thursday - exercise. Two hours in studio. Ran errands and had meetings in afternoon. Dinner out with husband.

Friday - jewelry class. So far, almost two hours in studio and a few more to go before an evening appointment tonight.

Saturday...yeah, I'll probably be working a bit tomorrow. My husband has a BIG golf day planned, so I can steal a little of our "couple time" since he isn't here for it anyway. And I need the studio hours, as this week's hours so far are a measly 11.5 (probably 14 hours by the end of today). That's not much!

Life seems simultaneously exciting and a bit stressful. If I had time, I'd put some Yoga on the schedule (and yes, I know how kind of oxymoronic that last statement is).  :)