Jewelry class

I was surprised when I started this English teaching job and they told me there will be a jewelry class here on Friday nights that I could attend. So I have been going to this class once a week, it is being taught by some people from a jewelry manufacturing company. We are doing wax carving. They know I was a jeweler, so they just let me work and don't bother me. We are making a ring for our first project. I am almost finished. Still need to refine the edges. It's been years since I carved wax. I enjoy it, but because I wasn't planning on carving wax when I came here I didn't bring my favorite wax carving tools.

Carving wax again

Things in Korea are going well.  This year is much like my first year where I am busy enough with other things that I don't think much about creating new work.  That's why I've made only one post in this blog since I came back to Korea.  

I finally started doing some wax carving in July.  I started on a ring, it was nothing special, I just wanted to start on something.  This is my work area:

 

The hardest things about working at a kitchen table in a tiny apartment are that the table is too low, it's not sturdy, its not easy to attach a bench pin, I get wax all over my living area, and there isn't enough light even with the desk light.  So a lot of things suck about it.  That's why I don't try to do anything except wax carving.  

I wasn't too interested in the ring I had started carving so I decided to carve a doodle I did during free time at school.  I didn't want to destroy the original drawing transferring it to wax so I traced it.  My "tracing paper" is actually the paper for blotting oil from your face.  I don't know what they are called in English. 

 

I attached my tracing to the wax by melting little spots of wax with my wax pen.

Then I poked holes along the lines of the drawing using a scribe.  After I took the paper off I rubbed baby powder on the wax to make the holes more visible and cut out the shape and filed the edges smooth. 

Next I deepened the lines using a wax carving tool and started to remove some of the material in the areas that will be carved the most deeply.  

In the picture below was the last time I worked on the wax with the drawing out.  The next time I worked on it I didn't have my notebook with the drawing there.  If I really want to copy the drawing accurately I should always have the drawing out, but it's not that important to me that I copy the drawing accurately. 

This is where I'm at now, there's still a lot of work to do.  I'm not carving the eyes, I'll put them in at the end by adding small drops of wax.  The piece is coming along very slowly cause I don't work very often.  

Below are two similar pieces.  The first one I carved in wax and cast around 2003.  The second one was carved in aluminum in 2006. 

felt things

Here are photos of the two brooches I entered in 500 Felt Objects. I figured I should put them on my blog cause they aren't likely to make it into the book.

Both of these are made from 1/4" thick industrial felt, anodized aluminum, and sterling.

I dyed the felt on this piece with fast blue anodizing dye. The aluminum is also fast blue. I did another version of this piece with a sort of brown/black piece of felt and orange aluminum, but I didn't like it and took it apart.


I dyed the felt on this piece black using Rit dye. The aluminum flowers are all slightly different shades of fast blue. I scraped the felt with a scribe to make it all fuzzy.


I didn't take many pictures while I was making these pieces because I was finishing them the day before the deadline for the book. One of the things I like about things like entering competitions and books and things is it give me a deadline for pieces I might otherwise drag out.

I really only took photos of the flowers I was carving for the black piece. I like how they turned out and I will probably make more of them for something else in the future.


I carved them primarily with burs, then used rubber wheels to smooth them. Carving the front went pretty quickly. The back side took much longer only because they were so difficult to hold on to. Next time I will have to come up with a better way to hold them than just trying to hold them in my fingers.


After anodizing, still attached to the wires used for anodizing:


Finished:


I like the look of the felt, but I don't really like working with it. It's too soft, and it doesn't have the feeling of durability that metal does. Metal will last a long long time. Materials like felt don't feel that way. Why would I want to spend much time making something that isn't going to last? But I'll probably make some more pieces involving felt and aluminum. I have some ideas, I just need to work out the details.

unfinished pieces

My aluminum and ebony brooch is pretty much done. I just need to screw the top part of the pin back to the aluminum. I wanted to photograph it with out the pin back cause I don't want to have to worry about the pin stem showing in the photos. I have photographed that piece twice and I am not happy with the results. I am having two problems. One problem is getting the dark brown ebony well lit with out over exposing the aluminum. It looks ok in some photos on the computer, but it always prints too dark. The other problem I am having is the green aluminum is washed out. It's not over exposed, its just coming out too light. I have tried turning up the color saturation in the camera, but that doesn't help. I can mess around with it in Photoshop and get it sort of the color it should be, but I don't want to do that. I'll post the rest of the process photos of that piece once I have a good photo of the finished piece.

I'm still trying to finish up my unfinished pieces, but I haven't been working very hard at it. I have several pieces I stopped working on because I wasn't sure how to continue with the design. Usually I stop working on the piece and think I'll figure out the right thing to do with the design later. Eventually it gets to the point where the piece has been sitting around so long it just needs to be finished. Even if the finished piece is not that good, I'd rather just have it done than leave it sitting around unfinished for a few more years. It also sometimes gets easier to finish the piece after its been sitting around for a long time because if a lot of time has been put into the piece I worry about making the wrong decision about the rest of the design and wasting all the time and effort I have put into it. But if the piece has been sitting untouched for like a year then I don't really remember all the time that went into it, so it's not as big of a deal to just make the design decisions and finish the thing. The pieces I am posting photos of today are not anything I spent a lot of time on, which makes it even stupider that they have been unfinished for so long.

The brooch in the photos below was something I made when I first got my Sherline mill in Sept. 2007. I think I was going to flush set some sapphires on it or something. I decided to just anodize it black and file the anodized layer off of the edges and the raised square on the front, and engrave the design on the back, which I had drawn on it back when ever it was that I was going to set stones in it.

The front:


All I need to do is make a pin back for it and it will be done. The pinback will cover the hole, and part of the top two engraved things.

The back:


Below are some earrings I never finished for some reason. I don't know when I started them or why I stopped working on them, but I am sick of them being unfinished.


I did some work on them last night and I guess they are mostly done. Maybe I will shape them a bit more.


The backs:

more work on the ebony and aluminum brooch

My goal is to finish all my unfinished pieces this winter, but I ended up starting something new last night. It's a lock pick. I make so many lock picks, but they are all the same couple designs. I'm sick of doing these same designs cause I could do so much more with custom lock picks, but most of my customers don't want to try anything new. So I started on one that's totally different from the other designs I have done. Lock picks don't normally take too long to make, but this one's going to be much more time consuming.

I also worked on the ebony and aluminum brooch. I haven't worked on it much since I wrote about it last cause I had other things to do. Last time I worked on it I finished shaping the aluminum part and put a texture on it with files.


Last night I made the sterling back plate for the ebony.


I also drilled the holes for the pins (or screws, I haven't decided yet) that will help hold the aluminum part. I will also use epoxy to hold the aluminum part. The pins will make it stronger and also hold it in place so I don't need to worry as much about the aluminum piece shifting before the epoxy dries.


The plate on the back will be attached with either pins or screws. Which ever I use I will also use some epoxy on them.


Since you cannot solder to aluminum, I have to use screws to attach the top part of the pin back. It was kind of difficult getting the little sterling plate to conform to the shape of the aluminum. The larger diamond shape drawn on the aluminum is a tracing of the sterling plate. After taking the photo below I burred away the area inside the smaller diamond. Burring away that lump made it easier to fit the silver to the curve of the aluminum.


After getting the sterling to fit a little better I drilled holes in it and the aluminum, then tapped the holes in the aluminum. Then I screwed the sterling piece to the aluminum and hammered the sterling directly on the aluminum until there were no gaps between the silver and the aluminum.


Next time I work on this piece I will finish making the pin back, make the screws to hold everything together and maybe anodize the aluminum. I still don't know what color to make it.

yesterday

Yesterday I mostly worked on fixing the problem with one of my pieces that I mentioned at the end of my previous post. It's an issue that comes up with the aluminum occasionally. I don't really understand it and I don't want to talk about it.

After that I worked on the aluminum and ebony brooch. I continued shaping the aluminum part, drilled a hole in the ebony for the aluminum part, and shaped the ebony part some more.


I should have done something different early on in the process that would have made things much easier. Before I started carving the aluminum part I should have put it in the lathe and made the bottom of the thing cylindrical so it would be easy to just drill a hole in the ebony and put it in.



Since I just free handed it with my micromotor it's not round. Which means after I drilled the hole in the ebony, I had to use a wood carving bur (pictured below) to try to make the hole match the shape of the aluminum piece. Doing that sort of thing is never easy. And of course what I ended up with was there being a gap between the aluminum and ebony in some places. Now I am trying to figure out the best way to make it look good. I wonder if my explanation makes any sense?

Speaking of wood carving burs, I think these spiky ones are so cool. I also like that they come in different colors. But they can totally tear up your fingers worse than any thing else I have experienced.


Keeping with my decision to finish all my unfinished pieces this winter, I decided to give up on finish this spoon in the photo below. It's not finished to my standards at all, the casting is so bad I think it would be faster for me to just remake the piece rather than try to fix all the pits. But this piece isn't important enough to remake.

I am not sure if I wrote about this spoon at all before, I carved the wax around 2000 or 2001 during my 4 year wax carving spree, and cast it in three parts in 2007. I don't know what happened with the casting, but two of the parts are just terrible. I worked on it for a while and finally put it aside cause I didn't want to deal with it. So now I just want to call it done and not worry about it anymore. I have no plans to photograph it any better than the photo below.

something I am working on

Here are some photos of a piece I was working on recently. It will be anodized aluminum and ebony. The design in my sketch book is dated January 2009. I am not sure when I started making it, but I didn't get very far before I stopped. I started working on it again last week. I'm trying to finish all my unfinished pieces this winter.

I like this design, so I'm not sure why I stopped working on it almost as soon as I started. The ebony part was mostly done, but all I had done on the aluminum part was roughly cut it out with my band saw. So last week I started shaping the piece. I like carving these kinds of things, but I am tired of the mess it makes.




After getting it mostly shaped with burs, I used files to get between the points and smooth out the areas I had burred. The pliers I am holding the piece with in the photo below are locking parallel pliers. I am a big fan of tools for holding the things I am working on.


The shape is mostly done. I still have to refine it.




The bottom part is ebony. I did most of the work on that piece when ever it was that I started this piece.


I'd like to just get this piece done, but I had a set back with a commission and have to spend some time redoing something on that. I hate having to redo things.

carrot ring and green bracelet

I started putting my enameled bracelet together yesterday. It's going ok now, but started out pretty badly. I have several more rows of pieces to put on it. I also have to fabricate the catch.


I also worked on my carrot ring. I'm removing the orange enamel. I decided to heat it and quench it to break off the enamel. I did that several times.


It's interesting that when you do that the enamel keeps cracking and chipping off for several minutes after it has cooled.


There's still some enamel on it, I guess I will have to grind the rest of it off.

preparing wood for handles

The other day I prepared some wood for lock pick handles. Usually I buy the wood cut as "pen blanks." Pen blanks are small blocks of wood about 3/4" x 3/4" x 6" used for making pens. Of course you could buy a larger piece and cut it smaller, but pen blanks are cheap and convenient.

My only wood working experience was a job I had about 11 years ago sanding and staining Adirondack chairs. Since I don't know much about wood working I just treat the wood like metal and that's been working out ok for me.

I get 2 handles from each pen blank by cutting the wood down the middle with my band saw. After I cut the pen blanks down the middle I cut the sides parallel to each other with a fly cutter on my Sherline mill.


Next I use a slitting saw on the mill and cut the slot for the pick blade. The slitting saw is about the same thickness as the steel I use for the pick blades.


The wood is now ready for me to make into a handle.

initial pendants

Right now I am finishing up a commission for 10 pendants. They are calligraphic letters, cut out of 1/4" aluminum. Sawing out the first letter or two was kind of a bitch cause the metal is so thick. But after I changed the saw blade size I was using and got some practice I started to enjoy it. I started out with a #8 saw blade, I thought I should use it cause the metal was so thick. #8 blades are good for cutting straight lines, but they are too fat to cut all the curves and corners of these letters. So I switched to the next smallest size saw blades I had, #2. The #2 worked much better, it was much more maneuverable and still cut through the metal fast enough.