From the category archives:

studio

New Tools, Continuing Upholstry and No More Room

22 June 2009

I got tools from Rio Grande this after­noon.
Clock­wise from the top. Ring man­drel — very pleased with the qual­ity and heft. Par­al­lel pli­ers — thank you Sarah L. for get­ting me addicted to those expen­sive lit­tle dears. Raw hide mal­let for bang­ing on metal. Ring clamp for hold­ing onto things and not sand­ing my fingers, […]

Tagged as: bench, parallel pliers, rawhide mallet, ring clamp, ring mandrel, snips, upholstery

Read the full article →

WIP — Pierced Copper Ring">WIP — Pierced Copper Ring

21 April 2009

Progress has been made on the ring.
A flat piece of cop­per was ham­mered and then cut into a cir­cle.
That cir­cle was dapped into a dome shape.
The the tree bit was sol­dered onto the domed bit, mak­ing a hol­low orna­ment
A chunk of 12 gauge half round ster­ling wire was made into a ring band.
The top was then […]

Tagged as: piercing, ring, soldering

Read the full article →

Experiments — Wire Wrapped Cabochons

24 March 2009

I’ve been work­ing with wire the past cou­ple of weeks. One fas­ci­na­tion is how to use wire to cap­ture cabo­chons. I bought a bag of small glass cabs that remind me of candy. By using light weight craft wire I’ve been able to cre­ate some inter­est­ing cages.
Here are two:
The blue doesn’t seem to have enough wire […]

Tagged as: cabochons, design, experiment, wire

Read the full article →

Housekeeping

15 March 2009

I cleaned out the top drawer in my bed­side table. Among the detri­tus were these.
Rang­ing form a brass koala given to me by a stranger in San Fran­cisco my fresh­man year in col­lege to a bot­tle shaped pin from the Maker’s Mark dis­tillery and about a dozen zoos in between.

Tagged as: pins, places

Read the full article →

Shiny…

16 February 2009

I took a PMC (pre­cious metal clay) work­shop with Mered­ith Arnold last week­end.
It took about 8 hours to make these four pieces in a class room. They are con­struc­tion sam­ples so fin­ish qual­ity is low.
PMC is nice to work with. The tools can be very sim­ple and it really does work like mod­el­ing clay. (Though […]

Tagged as: design, PMC

Read the full article →

learning to work with the new serger

14 December 2008

So it’s been a month or so since i got my serger. I made a cou­ple of starter projects on it when i first unpacked it but I had other projects (xmas) that needed my atten­tion and i didn’t have a chance to get back to it until last week.
I have a ter­ri­ble time buy­ing pants […]

Read the full article →

WIP — The Loop Road Project (pop-ups)">WIP — The Loop Road Project (pop-ups)

19 August 2008

Our recent vaca­tion gave Jim the chance to take a lot of pic­tures of motor­cy­cles and rid­ers on the prover­bial “closed course.” Some of them are in fact “pro­fes­sional rid­ers.”
I now have tons of unclut­tered pho­tos to work with. Hence the cre­ation of a new series of work, this time in engi­neered paper.
First up:
Solo Red Bike
Not […]

Tagged as: motorcycles, paper engineering, pop-ups

Read the full article →

TGIF — Gothic Arches">TGIF — Gothic Arches

18 July 2008

Two new/old gothic arches. I found these while I was purg­ing the work­ing projects piles. They aren’t much to look at being just a cou­ple of exper­i­ments with back­ground cre­ation techniques.

The birds and flow­ers was based on a piece of paper towel that I had used as a wiper for water col­ors in another project. […]

Tagged as: collage, gothic arches, paper

Read the full article →

Reusable Grocery Bag

11 July 2008

Every­body is doing it. Even here in the “bub­ble.” Using those ugly green reusable grocery bags.

Heart­warm­ing eco-points 8. Style points 0.
I won’t even men­tion what they chose to fill it with for this image. Yuck!
I made this one yesterday.

Heart­warm­ing eco-points 8. Style points 6. Maybe.
It’s still bet­ter than some vaguely poly­ester green thing with a gro­cery store […]

Tagged as: BurdaStyle, patterns

Read the full article →

Family Photographs — It’s All Grist for the Mill

22 January 2008

I’ve been col­lect­ing up the old photo albums and sort­ing the pic­tures. There are a num­ber that I’d like to use in the col­lages. But of course I don’t want to glue up my only copy of great-grandmother’s por­trait so… It’s time to get scan­ning. I’ll leave the has­sles of get­ting an elderly scanner […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries