I got tools from Rio Grande this afternoon.

new tools

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, and a pair of tiny pointy snips for getting into tight spaces.

But there is no way that I’ll be doing any work at the bench for the next couple of days.

there’s a bench under there somewhere

I have to finish the patio furniture cushions first. (They are gonna be great!)

new cushions in the making

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 sodlered to the ring band and… voila …

the front of the ring

ring face soldered onto the ring band

ring from the side

I happen to be pretty dang proud of my first “real” soldering project.

Next up the finishing. In the end the top of the ring will be black and the band will be satin finished silver.

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:

wire wrappings

The blue doesn’t seem to have enough wire wrapped around it’s front but it doesn’t shift. So maybe you don’t have to use quite so much wire as I did on the green one. Though the excessively snaky look is kind of cool.

I built these using a square of wire on the back and joining a much longer piece of wire with coils. The tightening the loose front wires by putting bends in them. Think tightening fences.

back of the wire wrapping

It’s all a bit of a spaghetti disaster while I’m trying to get the two peices of wire attached to each other. Maybe it will get easier with practice.

There is also the question of how to make the top/bail tidy.

First though I have an idea for making the front wires into a star…

I cleaned out the top drawer in my bedside table. Among the detritus were these.

detritus

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.

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 I’ve never been so careful to corral all the scraps of modeling clay.) A good quality finish takes work from the beginning and probably would have doubled the time taken for each piece. Maybe tripled for the embedded glass one.

You can fire pieces made only of the silver using a torch or propane firing cone but to fire pieces with glass (or synthetic stones, or forms) in them you have to have a kiln.

The material is expensive and the firing is a problem because i don’t want to spend $400 on a kiln just yet.

I’ll do more of this but not right now.

A simple die stamped piece:

I made this using the rubber stamp that provided the original version of the Black Dog Farm logo.

our logo in fine silver

It was fired, wire brushed, and given a short tumble with shot. At this magnification (about 3X) and in the glaring sunlight the rough finish shows. (and i think that’s cat hair…)

A layered charm:

Cut with canape cutters. Attached with slip. The holes are hard to get smooth on both sides.

moon charm

There’s a lump on the back that is result of getting air trapped in the clay while rolling it out. I was in too much of a hurry.

lump from an air bubble

Filigree wrapped glass bead

This is a 3/8″ blue glass bead that I wrapped in silver paste squeezed from a syringe.

pretty blue bead with silver filigree

Working with this fine a tip is hard but with practice the results could be quite pretty. You can also make hollow beads by using a form material that will burn out.

Glass beads and cabochon embedded in silver

There are three green glass beads and a diachronic glass cabochon.

leaf pin

I think the silver is too built up. I did some carving to get better relief but not nearly enough. As the clay dries it hits a sweet spot where carving is easy and enjoyable. So this could be really nice.

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 and leggings that fit well. Big butt and big thighs. I’m not prepared to tackle trousers yet but a decent pattern for leggings would be great. So I bought a simple two-piece pattern and some cheap brown velour off of the remnants table and set to work.

Measure, cut, pin, set up serger.

That last step didn’t go well. I could not get a seam to form, threads were breaking… I think i re-threaded the thing 5 times and rest all the tensions and over and over. Then it was time to walk away for a while. Returned to the problem, watched carefully as i wound the handwheel through several cycles. and then it happened. the thread coming from one of the cones hung up in the loop on the “antenna”. Right where the blue circle is…

the problem with my serger was…

a little thinking — and voila.

this is the correct position for the antenna

Yup, forgot to put the thread carrier tower up. Doh.

And no, there is no way I’m going to show you the results of this sewing experiment. I added a little extra material form the crotch tip to down just below the knees. I now have a very nice pattern for leggings that don’t wrinkle up at the crotch and just as soon as I make another pair I’ll show you pictures.

As for the brown velour. It hardly shows the cat hair at all and Nina is very fond of her new “blankie’ in the studio.

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 a very imaginative name I know.

I had to remove the rider from the original photo in order to have a clear background. Now that I’ve seen the piece assembled I think that I could have left the rider on the background and simply built the images out from there. It wouldn’t be as dynamic an image but it would have saved a bunch of time erasing the rider and bike and rebuilding the background.

red solo rider — closeup

Assembly began with printing and cutting out six copies of the rider. Tabs are attached to the fronts of 5 of the images and the base (shadow) is folded forward so that it will show when the rider group is attached to the card.

all six rider images

Here the riders are attached to one another. I used a strip under the shadows to give the bases something to stick to while I was attaching all the pieces. I left the strip under the riders because it made gluing the bases down in the right spots easier. (I should have gotten a picture before I glued it all down!)

Red Solo Rider rider images linked

Here’s the finished prototype.

It was a little confusing in Maryhill with everyone switching up the bikes and riders. To the best of my knowledge that is Tim Keene on Rolf Vitous’ pretty red record holding bike. I’ll ask for the details next time I see Rolf.

I have a number of other photos that I’ll be using over the next couple of weeks.

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. I added more color by dropping leftovers from the palette onto the towel and then let it run and dry without interference. Instead of cutting the background out with scissors I used a fine pointed brush and ran a bead of dark brown watercolor around the shape I wanted and when the towel was damp through both layers I pulled the it apart along the water line. It made a nice tonal background to which I added some wall paper cutouts and feather from my parrot.

The balloons was an experiment in using gesso in making backgrounds. I collaged paper and then stamped images on the background. When the inks had dried I put a thin layer of gesso over the entire surface. I put cutouts and a bit of string on the top.

Gesso does give an interesting texture to what goes on top if it. Also a good deal of “tooth” if you want to work with something like pastels or crayons. But I don’t think I’ll be using it much. It just makes everything too muted.

The borders are metallic pens that I had just bought. The red is a brush pen from Pentel. it takes a lot of coats to get a good coverage. (Red and green ones are commonly on sale around Xmas.) The gold is Krylon’s gold leafing pen. This one is worth hunting for. A few tips. Shake before using — a lot. Run a test line of about 4 inches on scrap paper to get the ink flowing well. You’ll get a very consistent line after that. Work in a well ventilated room — this thing stinks of it’s solvent. (Propylene Glycol Monomethyl Ether.)

The caption “Stolen Kisses Require an Accomplice” is by Texas Bix Bender. (A name I could vote for.)

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 logo on it.

I made it using the Charlie Bag pattern from BurdasSyle. At BurdaStyle you can also find several how-tos about making this bag using a serger, making the lined version (2 ways), and a gallery of bags made by burdastyle fans. (There are a couple of stunners — like this one.

This is the first thing I’ve made from a BurdaStyle pattern. It was an interesting but ultimately simple process. I’ll write more about burdastyle and their “print at home” patterns soon. Right now the sun is out and it’s Friday afternoon and I have a date with a sports car of my acquaintance…

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 to talk to any of the newer computers. It’s all connected now and that’s all what counts. I started with the photos that the MiL put together in a frame for my husband. They’ve been sitting on the wall for too long and the color ones (50’s — 70’s) have faded badly. We had wondered who some of the people in the older pictures were and hoped that identifying information was on the backs of the photos. Of course it was. Yeay Emmy! I got the pictures out and started scanning them. I did a few at 600 dpi but it was tortuously slow so I switched to 300 dpi. I think it’s sufficient for what I need. Now that the pictures are stored away from light (and other evils) I can go back and rescan at higher resolutions if I want to. TBC edited 25.june.2008 to correct image links