Now I'm in the process of altering a ring I made as a birthday gift. Easy as it may sound, putting gem eyes into a bronze snake ring that already has metal eyes is actually a very elaborate process. I got a mold made of the original casting, got a wax made from the mold, carved out the eyes in the wax, got another bronze ring cast from the new hollow-eyed wax form, antiqued the ring using liver of sulphur, then took it to a lapidary. I get it back on Thursday, "after" pics to follow.
After a few weeks of frustration and agony I'd gotten the hang of controling the flame, the manual dexterity of handling those terrible little tweezers to place minute chips of solder on seams of metal. It all came together and, for better and for worse, completely opposed to my feeling in my previous post, soldering became the most relaxing task in my life.
The thing I love most about FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology), where I took the Intro to Soldering class, is the lofty goals their classes present. On the first day of class, our instructor showed us the projects we would be required to complete. The ring, which looked like a forest of intricate confusion, and the Byzantine chain, which I believe is called Byzantine because of its mystifyingly complicated pattern (it's also known as "The Idiot's Delight"). How are we going to solder a tiny spot onto a delicate silver jump ring just over a quarter inch in diameter? Chie, our teacher, made it look easy, but he also had over 20 years of experience.
We started out trying to solder little sticks of silver onto a plate of brass. This must be like arts and crafts time in hell, I thought. Little did we know this would be harder than soldering silver to silver. So when the time came to "graduate" to one of the more complex projects, it was still difficult and it still took time, a lot of time, but we were prepared for it.
This one started out as 6 feet of 18 gauge sterling silver wire. I cut it into manageable 18"-ish lengths and used a skinny metal rod with a turn crank called a jump-ringer to coil the wire around so they ended up long, stiff coils of silver. Then I annealed the wire coils by heating them with a torch until they turned the color of salmon in the flame. Next, after dunking the coils into water to cool them off, I used a tiny sawblade to cut each individual ring from the coil. That's how the rings were made.
Then I took pliers to pull the ends of the rings away from each other and linked them together in the Byzantine pattern, which took a while to get a hang of. After that, I soldered each one closed individually.
The clasp I made out of another, larger gauge of silver rod using pliers and a forging hammer.
And now, to my total disbelief, it's done! In place of the anxiety I felt before there's a sense of accomplishment.
My first wax carving project, a two-headed snake dome ring, cast in sterling silver.After the wax class ended, I had created a lovely silver ring with two snake heads and a really huge brooch with my initials. I decided my next challenge would be soldering. I'd welded quite a bit in college and thought my prior experience would make it relatively easy to pick up this semi-related skill.
Boy, was I ever wrong.
Hours upon hours of dropping the nickel tweezers to avoid burning my fingers because I'd held the flame on the tiny silver pieces I was trying to solder to a small brass plate too long. Burning the tweezers so badly they snapped anything i tried to pick up into the air. Cursing like a maniac in the open studio hours on Sundays. Four hour stretches of getting barely anything accomplished.
This is another thing that's going to take time. Time to learn, and time to do.
The professor, who I also had for wax carving, is a master jeweler. He has been teaching at the school for more than 20 years, and making jewelry for longer. His soldering demonstrations take minutes, while we struggle for hours to make the slightest progress.
During class, and on the weekends when I struggle to complete my projects, I am filled with feelings of hope as things begin to stick, and wild, maniacal desperation when everything starts to melt off again. But after a few classes, in everyday life, I began to feel an incredible sense of well-being.
I became aware of the joyful fact that this soldering class, this voluntarily-elected exercise of trying to make tiny pieces of metal stick to a small metal plate with a torch, is of absolutely no consequence to anyone. Nothing is at stake, no one is depending on me to master this skill. I'm not enrolled at this college and I don't need to worry about a grade. And this is the most stressful, difficult problem I have in my life right now.
How wonderful is that?
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And here's the rotary cutter I'm getting. It cost more than the Fiskars model but I really love Olfa. Their cutters are so sharp and never seem to get dull.
Sketches to come...
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The necklace in the middle is my favorite piece. Someone walked by on Saturday morning and suggested I make something that looked like a feather. That's how this started, but it ended up looking more like a leaf. It took about 6 hours to complete. The frame is forged copper wire, and the middle is woven with beads on a thinner gauge copper wire.
]]>I've always been a collector of vintage jewelry I come across in thrift stores. I'm especially drawn to pieces from the 60s-70s. For a long time, I'd wanted to make a necklace using 70s colors and beads that were popular at the time. After I learned the techniques, I bought some turquoise and faux amber beads and started making jewelry. This is the first necklace I made, and it's still my most popular.
I call it "The 70s Necklace."
;)
In 2001, a friend threw a huge, voodoo-fetish-themed Halloween party. I like to make my own costumes, so I decided to make a voodoo doll costume. I made the top part out of dollar-store knee-high stockings that I sewed together with burgundy and grey darning yarn.
I made a few knots in the fabric and secured straight pins sticking outward, topped off with black candle wax so nobody got pricked.
]]>;)
Wolf Princess was born of a brainstorming project with a friend in which we posed the question, "What if there was a rock band that was comprised completely of people who had been raised in the forest by wolves?" There would be lots of howling and inarticulate drumming on pieces of wood with animal bones. We were going to form an experimental band based on this idea, but found out there was already a band called Raised by Wolves. Instead of forming a band, I developed the character of Wolf Princess, the feral-girl "singer" of the imaginary band. I made a myspace profile for her too, answering quizzes from the point of view of someone who had been raised by wolves. She needed a profile picture, so I made a fur bikini top for her and photoshopped on a wolf face for a hat. This was the original costume (at left), constructed with fur from an old thrift-store-bought mink stole.
;)
A few years later, the same friend had become part of a band. It was wolf themed and they asked Wolf Princess to sing with them. This is the second incarnation of the costume, made from remnant fox fur bought on ebay. After two performances, Wolf Princess decided that she would rather return to the forest than conform to the ways of society, so she quit the band and now lives in a hut near the forest's edge, communing with her old pack on moonlit runs through the woods.
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