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

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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 [...]

Tagged as: piercing, ring, soldering

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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 [...]

Tagged as: cabochons, design, experiment, wire

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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

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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. [...]

Tagged as: design, PMC

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

Tagged as: motorcycles, paper engineering, pop-ups

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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

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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 [...]

Tagged as: BurdaStyle, patterns

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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 [...]

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