Couldn't have said it better myself

Thought these words were incredibly deep and inspiring - came from a friend reacting to my post about the element of surprise at final outcomes..

"....it is not about knowing what I am doing so much as just opening to the small and quiet intuitions and images and the big, loud, and crushing ones- that the best things come out of something too complex and mysterious to ever completely master or understand. art like love and living life well has to do with imagination and trust and not so much knowing or certainty, courage and grace and not so much power and will."

inspiration

I am constantly inspired, by so much - looking around nature, cool iron gates. I really love rocks - especially the tiny ones from Baker Beach, shells, flowers, succulents, pods - I'm lucky that I can find inspiration almost anywhere if i take the time to slow down and look around and observe.

I find Andy Goldsworthy's work amazing. Its beautiful, surprising, and fleeting. His works of nature within nature are incredible and awe inspiring to me. Lucky for me - a small art studio in my alley feels the same - they created a piece that is obviously Andy - and seeing it inspired me to want to make it in silver, in my current obsession with cuff bracelets.

The original inspiration comes from a piece that Andy does where he suspends twigs from each-other using only the thorns and tiny branches from the twig itself. He does a piece with his signature circular design and also does entire walls as an installation in a museum.

One of the things I love about art is the suspension of belief, the tricks the eye can play on you or even the mind as it struggles to comprehend the complexity and beauty of a piece of art. To me that is what makes a great artist, or at least what I am drawn to ...beauty and surprise together make my mind swirl and swoon. That's what I hope to convey in my pieces as well..Something of interest yet beautiful, something that makes you wonder - how did it come to be?

I'm starting with my wire again. This is the last of the wire that I originally pulled from the ingot I made from melting down all my old silver scraps in my first session back. I started by sawing roughly 15-20 1-1.5" pieces. Using the building picture as my guide,I slightly bent the pieces and started to play with their placement. I thought soldering 2 pieces to eachother at a time and then putting them together would be the right technique. I now have a quite a few clusters done and I think the challenge with this piece will be to be able to piece these disparate clusters together in a way that keeps the entire piece in balance and while this piece does not have the same symmetry as my last one - I think aesthetically keeping it balanced will be important. Another challenge I see with this piece is perhaps its functionality...I will need to work on smoothing the edges with a file and hope that they will be comfortable on a wrist...also Adam pointed out - it will be a sweater snagger..oh no!

jesus te ama

okay this is no place for religion, but this tiled wall is right outside my jewelry class and for some reason speaks to me. i can't deny it.

sometimes its okay to walk away

Funny, I never thought I would be learning about myself and life through making jewelry - but somehow I am. Partially, I think having an external perspective that of a blogger and wanting to bring my audience (ha ha, what audience?) something more than a technical walk-through of every piece is making me be a bit more retrospective I guess.

The recent piece I was working on was an extension of my study of iron gates. I had planned to take the circular design in this picture and recreate it using mixed metals. I also wanted it to have a more organic shape so was planning on hammering it to create texture and distort it a bit.

I started by creating copper and silver rings out of wire. And soldering the pieces together, everything looked on track. And execution didn't seem too hard. But once I started hammering to apply texture the piece, it started to fall apart - the hammering made the solder brittle causing it to crack and split in certain areas. I went through the process at least 5 times... Cleaning off old solder with a moore's disc and re-soldering, then re-hammering.
It was getting frustrating, what should have been a fairly easy piece, one that wasn't going to take too long - instead was becaming very cumbersome. At the same time, aesthetically it wasn't working for me. I wasn't liking the mixed metal combo and when I tried the partially finished piece on my wrist, just wasn't really digging it. So - I gave up. And I'm okay with it.

This got me to thinking of times when its okay to give up or walk away from something- Sometimes it takes as much strength to do that as to stick with something. Here's my short list of when its okay to walk away from something:

When you are not liking the final outcome - in this case it was aesthetic..but the final product could take the shape of many things...a friendship, a project, a career path. When you realize you're not liking the final product, whenever in the process that is - I think its okay to stop and move on to something else.

When the process is causing frustration or pain. If you are doing yourself more harm than good by sticking with something..its probably best to quit. Smoking comes to mind, as does working out while injured.

When you'd rather be doing something else. Your time is precious...well i know mine is and in a 3 hour a week jewelry class - it becomes ever more apparent. Spend time on projects I care about, not on ones I've lost interest in.

I've walked away or given up on situations before, but then I've also stuck things out - when you invest so much time, effort and care into something, its hard to walk away..but sometimes its for the best.

When you do you think its okay to be a quitter?

Completion, surprise and satisfaction

Finally finished my piece and I am happily surprised with the finished product. My last class, I had finished soldering all the pieces, but the bracelet still needed a lot of clean-up. There was a lot of solder around all the joins that needed to be filed down. The clean-up process involved using a fine moore's disk attached to a flexible shaft with a foot pedal that controls the speed of the disk rotation...makes for a quick efficient way to file edges and clean up pieces. It is important to apply an upward motion when using the Moores' disk, otherwise you can end up with multiple uneven grooves. I probably went through about 10 moore's disks s I removed the solder that had flowed in and around the joins and also smoothed out the edges and angles.

After using the moore's disk I then switched to a rubber buff that removed additional sharp edges. This tool was able to get me inside the smaller angles and remove some of the imperfections caused by joins that were not perfect matched...with perfectly flat angles. The next step was to then take the piece and apply a finishing buff on a polishing motor machine. This last step was combined with a polishing compound that I would apply to the buff itself every 30 seconds or so...and created a nice sheen, which while not overly shiny gives the piece a somewhat relaxed, sexy luster.

I then took the polished piece and using a raw-hide mallet hammered around a cuff mandrel rotating it up and down as I hammered it to keep it even.

The final piece looks nothing like I imagined...its funky and kind of hippie chic, as opposed to the symmetrical, structured composition I was drawing inspiration from. Once I took the shape and formed it into a cuff, it took on an entirely different look from what I had expected. But I love it. It is precisely that element of surprise that is so satisfying for me..to think a piece will look a certain way and have it come out so differently, yet still beautiful and unique. After so many hours invested truly gives me both pride and happiness.

fuego

Molten silver about to be poured into a cast - the fire and liquid silver are mesmerizing. Fuego!

symmetry and the start of something new - torch enamel

My bracelet continues to take shape...piece by piece and it is now pretty much done. Adam helped me finish it by using wire solder to fill in the gaps within the multiple joins which make up the piece. Stick solder is a different animal than regular solder but when used correctly, can work miracles.

The next steps will be pure clean-up: Filing, removing visible solder, and using a moore's disk to clean the edges.

In the meantime, I also started a quick turn-around project. Think everyone needs these small projects to keep busy and also for the instant gratification they provide. So I am making some Spanish inspired copper hoops that I've added texture to and will also be adding color to through a process called "torch enameling"

Enameling seems to work best on copper. And adding texture
to the piece can really make the color pop even more.

I used a kick press to cut out the smaller circles of my hoops and then a saw to cut the outer circles. I then filed the edges to make them smooth and added texture by hammering the metal using a raw-hide mallet and metal stamp. Fun to get my aggressions out :)

The earrings are relatively simple project which I think I needed since my other piece is so complex. I'm also excited to learn how to torch enamel, I have done bit of enameling in the past but used a kiln instead. My next step will be to test out some of the enamel colors to see which I like best - I'm thinking I'd like them to have a translucent orange / yellow look to them.