Repousse' repose, or however you spell it

The ancient art of Repousse and chasing is a way to get deeper grooves and designs into your pieces - essentially making a shallow bah relief. It is done using a pitch and in our case, a cast iron pan.

Foregoing the traditional tar Repouse which is pretty smelly and difficult to deal with, Adam uses a special kind of pine sap - which has no real odor, thankfully. The first step is to melt or soften the pitch - which is usually done with a torch making the top layer unusable for the future. My instructor, Adam has actually developed a technique that uses a nifty heat gun to soften the pitch instead.

Using this heat gun instead of a torch actually saves quite a bit of the pitch and makes it usable for future / additional projects.

The next step is to then brush baby oil onto the metal which keeps it from sticking and also turning the corners of the piece down. Using chasing tools, you can then proceed to create elaborate designs that can have depth in both directions as you flip the piece and add decorative elements on both sides. The effect is quite beautiful.

Its not something I've tried yet ....but on the list, ole'

Goldsworthy Inspired Cuff

My cuff is coming along - this week, Adam introduced me to a nifty tool called a cup burr that I used to round the sharp edges of my bracelet. Here, I thought I was going to have to file each of the sharp edges down using a file or sand paper. Which would have taken hours on each point. With this tool, I was able to round the points in a matter of 1-2 minutes.

I'm liking the progress but realized when I went to shape the cuff around my wrist a couple of issues...
1) its not lengthy enough and
2) the edges around the inside of my wrist are quite sharp...so I guess I'll need to add a few more pieces of silver.

Slow going - but it looks pretty cool. Kind of like Japanese writing or calligraphy - also has kind of a retro 80's feel. I like it, just hope its functional. Another challenge, striking the balance between form, beauty and intrigue.

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?