Fabricating for the Folk Festival!!!!

 

What a whirlwind few weeks this has been! A great trip around the bay, caught some fish, rowed and rowed and rowed a punt, and in the spare moments worked on jewellery.  Only so many things are portable projects though, so this week has been a steady exercise in disciplining myself to work down through my list and get as much as possible ready for the Folk Festival this weekend.  I love having a booth in the craft tent there.  It's such a great venue, especially when the weather cooperates, and the bonus is getting to hear all the great music all day long!  And what an exciting line-up this year.  I've heard that Friday night is sold out already.  http://www.nlfolk.com/fest2011/fest2011.html

So I've got two new series of jewellery I'm excited to be launching at this year's folk festival: above is the series of pins I've titled Investment Properties.  They're etched silver and copper, each one unique, and I'm thinking of doing custom houses in this same vein.  The other series I've been working on in collaboration with Alexis Templeton (http://www.alexistempleton.com/).  She made porcelain cabochons and glazed them in her signature crystalline glazes.  Then I set them into jewellery: necklaces and brooches so far.  We'll see what comes next...  I'll also have a great selection of silver earrings in a variety of styles.  In copper, I've etched some earrings in new designs, along with some in my new popular cattails pattern.

Hard at it.

What a week!  Churning out the jewellery like never before!  Phew!  The Folk Festival is coming up, and we're fitting in a wee camping jaunt before that, so the pressure is on!  I've made some exciting new pieces in the Crystalline Cabachon series, and I've got another series that I think I'll call Investment Properties (oooo...the mystery....). Both will make their public debut at my booth at the Folk Festival.  I also managed to finish up a commission that I've been working at for some time.  Sense of accomplishment is running high right now, and yet I still see miles to go before I sleep!  I will be filing and polishing silver at the campsite I do believe!  One thing that's made life easier is the arrival of my new mini drill press.  A gorgeous little machine that makes the delicate operation that is drilling 20 or 22 gauge holes much less back-breaking. (See first image: back-breaking, second image: aah, not back-breaking!) She is Chinese, so the language barrier upon our introduction was amusing.  Some snippets:
"It is of novel design, small and exquisite bulk, handy carry.  The cent of product has no class to adjust soon with single soon two kinds."
"It for bids to wear gloves, do not bare the body not knot tie while operating."
"The operation please read the manual before."

And the garden is once again holding her own.  It took years, but finally I can let it do its thing, while I do mine.  Still some gaps to fill in, but for the most part, at most times of the summer, there's a blooming jungle out there.

Crystalline Collaboration

Friday and Saturday at Alexis Templeton's studio were great fun.  She had made a selection of porcelain cabochons and glazed them in crystalline glazes.  What precious little gems!  The jewellery process is slow going and challenging when I was working from a portable kit of tools, so I didn't create masses of new pieces in the two days we spent together, but the exchanging of ideas was very fruitful, and was aided no doubt by the decadent chocolates she sells - oh divine!  I am excited about the continued development of this collaboration, with new shapes of cabochons depicting the night sky over mountains, and the perfecting of the frosted look of the glaze on the wee pieces of clay.  Now that I'm back in my own studio, the jewellery designs to compliment the clay pieces can be more substantial, and incorporate more silver.  My wee torch just couldn't tackle all the grand ideas I had in my head at Alexis'!  So we'll see where this all leads, but it sure is exciting to have put two heads together and come up with a focus for a new line of jewellery that incorporates such beautiful pieces of glazed clay.  There is nothing quite like crystalline!  Thank you to Alexis for inviting me to share in this project, and to everyone who stopped by the open studio to see what we were up to!  Stay tuned for more!

See How it's Made

Well the weeks do fly by!  The Annual Member's Exhibit is up and looks fabulous, as does the exhibit in the Annex Gallery: Flourish, an exhibition of Aboriginal Craft.  Be sure to drop in to Devon House and have a peek.
This week I've been absorbed with finishing a commission.  A bit of sculpture, not jewellery, though I did use sterling silver.  It is interesting how the challenges of working on a small scale morph into different challenges when working on a larger scale.  Some things are easier, but other things are a whole lot harder!  Like soldering larger sheets of silver!  It was all my torch could manage to get the heat high enough for the solder to flow.  I'm pleased with the end result and once my customer has seen the finished product, I will post a photo.

 

So now what's this image at the very top of this post about, you say?  Well, that's my next endeavor!  I'm collaborating with Alexis Templeton (that's her gorgeous plate, above) on a crystalline cabochon jewellery project on July 8th and 9th at her studio.  The link to the event is here: http://www.seehowitsmade.ca/avalon.html  Alexis makes the most exquisite crystalline glazes and she's invited me to her studio for this collaboration.  She will make porcelain clay cabochons, glaze them in the crystalline glaze, and I will set them in jewellery.  Neat eh?  I'm so excited about the possibilities of crystalline glazes alongside silver, copper, and brass!  I'm imagining brooches and pendants mostly but it's all a grand experiment, so we'll see what evolves.  Alexis' studio is located at 75 Quidi Vidi Road and we'll be there all day Friday and Saturday, so please drop by and say hello!  http://www.alexistempleton.com/

Annual Member's Exhibit: 20/20

Another summer is here!  Although the weather is determined to convince us otherwise, the plants are defying the odds and turning green, the grass is growing, and that means the Annual Member's exhibit is once again upon us.  This is the 20th Anniversary of the Craft Council Gallery, and so the theme for this year's show is 20/20, with the idea of the submissions reflecting a vision of where we're headed as individual craftspeople.  The pieces I have in this year's show are a reflection of some of the brand new skills I've acquired during my studies in Haliburton, and are a glimpse of my intention to take my work up a notch to a new level of professionalism.  I'm really pleased with these pieces, they are truly one-of-a-kind.  And I'm thrilled to have them included in this year's exhibit alongside the work of so many truly talented and inspiring craftspeople.  The exhibit opens this Saturday, June 25th at 2pm and runs until September 4th.  Drop down and visit! http://www.craftcouncil.nl.ca/news/2011-annual-members-exhibit/

Meanwhile, I'm keeping busy in my studio with a commission for a 25th wedding anniversary.  It's keeping me on my toes.  Commissions seem to be a great way to step outside my "box" and make something different, and in the process, I'm tackling things from new angles and finding exciting possibilities for future projects as well.

I'm also working on components for an open studio collaboration I'll be doing with Alexis Templeton at her studio on July 8th & 9th.  I'll post more about that next week....  Should be lots of fun!

And I'll leave you with two links that are exciting me today.  The first I will peruse in more detail as time permits.  It's called the National Parks Project, and is a joint undertaking between musicians and filmmakers that focuses on  many of our beautiful national parks. http://www.nationalparksproject.ca/

And the other link is to a nifty little house-ish structure that would make a great studio (my second choice studio since stumbling upon the  Tiny House Blog, the first choice was a straw bale construction).  I think I'd need a cat with a crooked tail to go with it though!  http://tinyhouseblog.com/stick-built/rustic-way-whimsical-house/

Reinvention

"Finished" is a very subjective state of existence.  In getting a handle on my inventory these last couple of months, and in choosing which new directions to pursue first,  I've been looking at my jewellery with fresh eyes.  I've created pieces that seemed truly done at one time.  I thought through the design process, I did the work, I polished the final result.  But then, given some distance in time, I'm seeing new directions for some things.

At left is a bangle I made in Haliburton.  I wasn't overly thrilled with the final shape.  Granted, it was an exercise in technique, more than design, but I finished it the best I could.  Then the inspiration of last week's etching workshop at the printshop hit me.  And so the bangle I didn't love became the cuff above that I absolutely do.  Now I see the infinite possibilities for this bangle design.  Absolutely infinite!  And narrower ones in silver and brass....

Another design I put together quite some time ago was a series of earrings like the ones on the right.  I had quickly sold a similar pair at Devon House and thought I'd hit on a design that appealed.  So I made more of them.  But they have not proved as popular as the first pair.  What to do?  I exposed them to different audiences, still no takers.  But then I saw them in a different light one day.  Less as a failed design, more as components that could be reinvented.  I've had customers ask if I make earrings on posts.  And it was then I saw the potential in these to reconstruct them into something my customers might be looking for.  The results are below, with the spin-off bonus that I like the look of the remaining copper cups on their long shepherd hooks so much that I've claimed a pair for myself!

Aren't they cute?  I'm really pleased with them.  And even if I'm the only one who thinks so, I can hopefully learn from this experience, so that what initially seems like a dead-end design suddenly does a cartwheel, and voila!, become something new.

THAT is an etching.  It is not a piece of jewellery.  I was very excited this past week, to take an etching and aquatint class from Philippa Jones (http://www.philippajones.com/) at St. Michael's Printshop here in St. John's.  Etching in jewellery making is one thing, but I suspected that etching in printmaking was entirely another.  In fact there are a lot of similarities.  But the differences are what have excited me to now bring this new knowledge across the chasm into my jewellery making.

Here's the process, abbreviated.  At right is the drawing I prepared ahead of the class.  We were instructed to utilize both line and tonal values.  If you are a regular reader, this image may look familiar.  I do not count myself amongst the talented draw-ers of this world.  I can however, given enough time, produce a reasonable replica from a photograph.  This drawing is an amalgamation of three pictures I took during our studio tour on the Southern Shore, and some of which I shared in my last post.  I had sincerely hoped that there was a way we would directly transfer our drawn image to the copper etching plate, but that was not the case.


The copper plate is coated with "ground" (resist in jewellery-speak), and then I redrew the image onto it using the tool pictured (which is just a sharpened piece of steel).  It is only necessary to scratch through the ground, not into the copper.  And then it is etched.  Once it comes out of the acid you apply ink to the plate, and then "pull a print".  Simple as that.  The result is the image at the top of this post.  Etching reproduces the line values in a drawing, not the tonal values.  For that you then do an aquatint. This is a secondary process done on the same plate.  Using a "painterly" technique, ground is applied in stages to the plate, blocking out the lightest areas, then the next lightest, and the next, and so on, with a brief etch happening in between each.  (I likened it in my mind to making Ukrainian easter eggs.)

At right is the plate after a couple of these layers of ground have been applied.  The ground is the dark brown part, and they are covering the areas I wanted to remain the lightest in the finished print.  It was difficult to separate in my brain the application of a dark brown covering that would result in a light area when it was done.   Philippa emphasized the importance of realizing that the aquatint would not exactly replicate my drawing, no matter how hard I tried!  With an aquatint I had more freedom in the application of the ink to the plate than with the etching, so the image can be more or less dark, as desired.  Below is the finished plate and aquatint.

 

I loved the workshop.  I think my patience lies more with the etching than with the aquatint process, I would prefer to take more care with my line values to convey the illusion of tonal values, rather than go through the repetition of painting ground and etching required to create an aquatint, but I have only done it once, so with practice the aquatinting might become easier.  

But this blog is about jewellery, so now what.  Well!  I loved the detail I could get with the printer's ground, and I intend to seek out some of that so I can refine my etched designs in jewellery.  That is the biggest and most immediate result of this workshop.  Down the road I may try making mini etchings that become art jewellery in some way, or the mini etched plate would become a piece of jewellery, and in partnership with it maybe would be a print from the plate itself.  So many possibilities....