School!

School

Silhouettes! I love them!  These fish are a portion of a panel honouring the sponsors here at the college.  Each fish has a name on it and is a different patinaed metal.  Just one example of the originality of thought I've encountered here so far. 

I thought I'd tackle this blog in an effort to stay in touch and in tune while my production work is temporarily on hold during my studies.  I hope I can make this weekly synopsis of my activities here sound interesting to those of you who choose to read my blog.

Haliburton is a gorgeous area of the country, as everyone has told me it would be.  I'd love to be here in the fall sometime.  It's full-on winter here now, and that has been missing in my life for a number of years, so I'm drinking it all in.  Beautiful snowy vistas greet me everywhere I go.  The deer and turkeys are my silent sentinels each morning and evening: 

So my first week has been a whirlwind, as I had expected.  We've been tackling chainmaking with Susan Watson Ellis (http://www.paradigmdesignswe.com/).  Five days and five impressive (I must say!) chains later, my soldering skills are vastly improved.  Bye-bye paste solder...I've reconquered chip solder after casting it aside in frustration years ago.  I'm super impressed how quickly my classmates learned to solder this week, many of them for the first time.  We soldered heavy and fine chains, as well as doing some chainmaille designs.  There's a certain zen-ness that one must find, I think, in order to do chains well.  You can't do any of it in a hurry, that's for sure.  While I wasn't super excited to do the chainmaille, it turns out to be quite a soothing process.  You're watching for a repeating pattern, and imagining the possibilities if you were to just change the twist of rings this way or that.  It would definitely appeal to knitters I think, or even those who enjoy origami.  Jewellery tools are invariably expensive, so any cost saving measure is always a great boon to production.  The niftiest tip we learned this week was to use steel knitting needles as spindles/mandrels for winding jump rings!  They're cheap, easily replaceable, and they have the sizes clearly marked on the ends!  Genius!