Rob jackson dropped by the CCSF studio last month to share his knowledge with us.  Unfortunately, as of right now, he doesn’t really have a website or anything I can link to in order to show off all of his work, but it’s good stuff.   He brought with him as an example of his style, lots of rings.  I’ve got a couple pictures of them below, but they really don’t show them as well as this picture does.  They’re made from iron nails that have been soldered to a sheet of gold and then formed into a ring.  The rings he had at the workshop were pretty much the same thing, except that most of them had silver bands instead of gold.  Typically I’m not a fan of gold in general, but I think it plays off the color and texture of the iron nails beautifully in his work.  And I’m a bit of a sucker for rubies…

He left us with lots of tricks – mostly dealing with casting – like inlaying steel into a casting.  I’m looking forward to trying out his method of mixing up waxes.  One of my aversions to casting is dealing with the wax – I can’t seem to find a wax that behaves how I’d really like it to.  Making my own might help that out.

February was a busy month for commissions and that trickled into the start of this month as well.  I had a couple of requests for rings using moonstones.  I love the way this stone looks, but I don’t really use it that often.  In the picture above, the smaller band has a white moonstone set in it.  It’s pretty much impossible to capture the true look of moonstone with a still image, but this one has a shimmery, milky look to it.  In the ring below, I used a blue moonstone.  The stone itself is more translucent than the white moonstone, but it shimmers with blue reflections in the light.  Again, almost impossible to capture the real look of these, but they both turned out great and I hope the people they’re going to enjoy them as much as I did while making them!

Once a semester or so, some lapidarists come into the class to offer up their work to us.  The majority of their stock usually doesn’t really interest me – I prefer translucent  stones – however I can usually find a couple of interesting pieces.  I usually always grab some dinosaur bone from them.  I’m not the biggest fan of the way it actually looks, but come on… it’s made from the bones of dinosaurs.  So last night I picked up a set of dino bone cabochons.  I also picked up an interestingly shaped anyolite (ruby in zoisite) and a shiny faceted rutilated quartz.  I’ve got a few ideas for these little guys.

I’ve been busy working on commissions this past couple of weeks so I haven’t had much time to work on my own projects.  I’m trying to locate a decent supplier for bullet cut garnet cabochons right now.  Once I find the gemstones, I’ll be able to get back to work on the locket type container thing I’m working on.  So many projects and so little time…

My current work in progress is a sort of locket type creation I’ve got in my head. The textures I envisioned for it brought up the perfect opportunity to try out etching silver. I’ve been wanting to learn this for a while but just haven’t had the chance to yet. So I got a hold of some ferric nitrate and set about transferring my image to a sheet of silver. For this I decided to try out using laser printer toner as a resist. The popular method seems to be printing the image to transparency film, but I found a guy on the web that does the same thing but on the backing of sheets for mailing labels. I had those laying around, so I went with that method. Fired up the iron and heat transfered it to the silver and what I ended up with wasn’t exactly the best transfer, but it was perfect for the texture I wanted. If you’re looking for a crisp image, I’d stay away from the mailing label trick – the resist didn’t transfer well at all.
Regardless, I’m happy with the etching I ended up with. I definitely want to explore this technique further – there’s something satisfying about eating away at silver with highly corrosive acid. Oh, and I guess getting really cool textures with it is great too…

Most people celebrate the new year in January.  I celebrate it in February. I suppose party because that’s when I was born, but in actuality it’s also about when I start getting all of my projects and ideas into swing. The first project is this website. The design has been moved around a lot and there’s still some fine tuning, tweaking and prettying up to be done but it’s mostly there.

It’s a new semester at CCSF as well and the metal arts class is keeping me busy.  There are no set assignments for us this time around.  Instead we need to come up with five challenging pieces by the end of the spring session.  The first thing piece I’m working on is a locket type container.  I used last night in the workshop to make a mock up of the main hexagonal piece out of brass.  I haven’t tried much scoring and folding to create things so I wanted to be sure that I had it down before I attempt it in silver.

The casters were in full force last night as well, filling our lungs with soot.  I’m going to be doing more casting this semester – in an attempt to get over my deep hatred of it.  I love the process of actually casting, I just hate designing cast objects.  Which is odd, as I love sculpting.  Perhaps it’s just that I really hate wax… who knows.