retip retip retip

I quietly suspect the reason that jewelers are mainly hidden in the back of the store is correlated in some way to the high tendency for swear words and temper tantrums -other side effects include (but not limited to) high blood pressure and spontaneous crying, which is of course, based on zero medical information.

A friend of mine and I were discussing possible improvements that could be made to any studio that would adequately accommodate said fits. The only thing we could agree on was a sound proof padded room. See, at the door, you’d have to take off your shoes, select the appropriate sized helmet and put it on, and then enter the room. In one corner there’ll be one of those ridiculous inflatable sand-in-the-base punching things they make for kids with an annoying primary colored clown smiling on it. Remember those? You smacked them and they came right back up. Awesome. You can punch it, kick it, slap the poo out of it. Whatever. And you can swear in there if you want because its SOUNDPROOF. Brilliance. And when you’re done having your tantrum, you can go lie in the corner that’s filled with piles of fuzzy blankets and teddy bears and cry it out. Tissues included. And when you LEAVE the room, a small tray pops out from the wall with cookies and warm milk on it. HOW outstanding would that be? And you could literally apply this in any work situation! Go ahead, sweet reader, imagine!

Moving on

Based on what I just wrote, im sure that you can take a guess at how this week went. The week started off relatively similar to the other weeks, only that we had Monday off. So the first day back was a quiz day. This quiz we took was one of the hardest to date. Im not going to bother you with my score, suffice to say that I passed. I knew before I looked at the scores that I didn’t do as well as I have been, so I made the necessary adjustments in my head to prepare for it prior to seeing it. Which helped me avoid aforementioned crying. Ive discovered that my expectations for myself here are far higher than they have ever been in my entire life. I have set this standard for myself that doesn’t give me much room to stumble or fall or make mistakes, although I know that these things are inherent to my success. So when discussing my quiz with Jerry, he quoted someone and said that you’ll make a thousand mistakes before you do it right. Or to that effect. I don’t know what it was about what he said, but it made me feel better.

We made split bails this week. some call the rabbit ear bails. I was working on mine and I was to the point that I was going to solder it to the head, and I thought “something doesn’t look right”, so when I showed it to Jerry, he handed me another piece of stock to start over. Nice. Turns out my bail was big enough to slide on to one of those thick Run DMC rope chains.

Also on the schedule were a series of repairs to “BeBe Anderson” (again, all projects have names, like customers). Jerry started this lecture by saying that if you walk into any of the classes that are further along and just say “BeBe Anderson”, you’ll hear swearing and see people throwing things. Encouraging. So the basis of this was we had to “simulate” prong wear by filing down two prongs (intentionally damaging our own work!) and file away a third completely parallel to the girdle of the stone (try and keep up, dear reader). The one that we filed away we had to rebuild using stock in the shape of an “L”. hence L prong. Or that’s what he called it.

So far:Two retips and an L prong.

In the course of this re-tipping, one of my classmates was tightening his stone (he was allllllmost done) and the prong completely buckled to the side.

See:

The international sign for a buckled prong is now represented in our class by tilting ones head to the side.

How did I do you ask? Well. I got through the retips, I did the L prong. All was (notice “was”) well until I realized that I now had three juicy prongs and one emaciated prong. So I talked it out with Jerry. And the consensus was that it would be far more aesthetically pleasing to look at with four equal prongs, but it wasn’t necessary to do the 4th unless I wanted the practice……. Of course I wanted the practice. Long story short, I got the 4th one done, and when TIGHTENING MY STONE, hear a faint crack. Yes. Crack. it’s the quietest most horrific sound anyone in this industry has ever heard. That crack was my stone. DAMMMMMMNNNNNNNNIT! Anyway, I learned how to reset stones this week too.

I was prepared to leave this week with my head hanging and my proverbial tail tucked. I felt like I learned so many humbling lessons this week, and have vowed to work harder and study as necessary to keep ahead. And I’m trying not to be too hard on myself in regards to any stumbles I may have. But you know, I got the boost I needed at my 6th week satisfactory progress review! I have no absences, no tardies. I have a 100% completion rate on my projects which he said was unusual to have (whoot!), my quiz average is 93% (would have been higher…..), I soared through my first bench exam, I passed all my counter sketching… things look good! REALLY good. And the best was when he said that he could tell by my work and the questions that I ask that I really want to be here, and that students like me are what makes teaching worth it to him. It was a really sweet moment, a grand ending to an otherwise challenging week and makes me look forward to the next 19 weeks with hope, clarity and resolve.

For Kristy, i resurrected "Jeweler Monkey" enjoy.

No hand injuries to report this week!

week 7 preview: more repair work, earrings earrings earrings quiz and bench test #2.

Be well my friends.

Lets get to the meat of it

NOW we’re talking.


Enough of this namby-pamby silver working stuff for us.


With a swift kick in the metalsmithing pants, we were thrust into the heart and soul of gemstone handling and gold work this week.

We started the week off by just soldering head after head (and by head I mean the prongy claw looking thing you set stones in) on to brass rings and cutting seats. Now, I’ve never done this. I’ve watched it done, but never done it personally. Its pretty rad.

Yes I said rad.

Following that we got to learn how to set round brilliant cuts and shape prongs in eighty jillion shapes. Now, they don’t give us real diamonds to set seeing as we’re all pretty new at this, so what we get are pretty good looking representations called spinels. it’s a rock, just not the one you would pay big bucks for. For the most part I found the cutting of the seats and the setting of the stones pretty easy, it’s the attempting not to chip or disfigure the stone that’s the problem. Plenty of classmates had to get new stones due to chipping. I was fortunate enough to not have to. ALTHOUGH I did have to replace one head at some point because I managed to successfully melt one prong into a tiny ball of metal. Sweet.



I do!
We also dove right into installing our own heads onto bands that we had to shape to fit ourselves. Which, dear friend, involves filing precise angles. Which sounds deceptively easy the first time you hear about it and attempt it. But I managed to get the hang of it pretty quickly.

If you try and pick up a stone with tweezers, or your large fat fingers, or you jam on it too hard trying to set it, the stones fly.
Did I mention stones flying? Stones fly. Like how birds do, but no wings.

What do you do when they do this? You go hunting in the direction of the stones flight path and pray that you find it. I heard more colorful phrases then I care to repeat as people watched their stones take flight. I also saw lots of folks in the downward search crouch which is a universal sign for everyone else in the class to help look for something tiny and lost.

See:
For the most part this week was all new to me, but working on gold is way easier then silver just because its so much harder of a metal, therefore less susceptible to dings, dents, scratches. I like it. Its also starting to get really fun in class. We’re all bonding pretty well and I feel like ive been blessed with a great group of folks that im relating to really well and developing great friendships with . I’m looking forward to meeting these guys out in the field and forging awesome working relationships with.

speaking of bonding,

This week we organized a get together. Our first “bar night” as a class. Hooray! So last night I dragged my roommate and co-conspirator out to meet some of these people I talk about nonstop. There were about 5 or 6 of my actual classmates and some of the kids from the graduate gemology program there. It was SO much fun, and we all just sat around and talked about other things then class. But let me tell you, when we really did talk about class (to vent of course), it was so so so nice to be surrounded by people who spoke my language! People that I could use words like porosity, facet, culet, and alloy around and they knew what I was talking about. I don’t feel so nerdy around them. Ha. Ha.

Hand injury tally for week five:

• Miscellaneous grabbed metal while its hot burns: 3
  
• Combination file stabslash on left thumb: 1
  
• Mizzy wheel took off and ran across my finger: 2

Also accidentally inhaled half of metal scrap dust when I accidentally knocked the tray off my bench with my big awkward shrek sized elbow. My lungs will be worth more then my funeral will cost one day, so please, dump me off at a refinery.



Until next week, my friends. Be well.

my hand is cramped in the hammer holding position

Terms you will need to understand before proceeding:

Anneal: to subject an alloy, metal, or glass to a process of heating and slow cooling to make it tougher and less brittle (in other words: torch it)

Rolling mill: a machine with rollers that press metal, usually in ingot form, into sheets or bars of the desired shape and size (which is a very lengthy manual process, which while doing sort of makes you look like an organ grinder)

I don’t particularly remember what order this week went in. what I remember from the blur is:

quiz
quiz
bench test
rolling mill annealing rolling mill annealing rolling mill annealing
hammer hammer
hammer
annealing.



What I DO know is that week four passed without one scar caused by any tool or torch in my bench




however….


Tuesday evening at my exhilarating arts and crafts hell job, three and a half minutes into my shift I managed to get a cardboard induced paper cut on my left ring finger from a “t-shirt form” for fabric painting, of all things. Damn you cardboard.

So this week. We had one project, which was actually like three (hundred) in one. The first part of it involved pouring molten metal into ingot molds. An ingot is basically a rod of metal, in this case, sterling silver, made from silver shot or scrap. From there you take that ingot and you roll it through what’s called a rolling mill and flatten it into sheet, stock, bezel or whatever size of metal you need. Step three (thousand four hundred and sixty six) involves taking your newly formed sheet (or fill in the blank) and shearing off a piece to form a ring. Which in our case was one of two rings. The first one, “simones” ring, was a simple band originally sized to a dainty size 4 (conjuring pal Kelly) and we had to stretch it to a 10.

Its quite a strectch pun intended, but imagine if you will.

Anyway, the trick here is the annealing of the metal every size and a half or so. If not, your ring pops open and you get to start over. What im happy to announce is mine is one of the only ones that didn’t pop open. Hallelujah.

Our second project ala ingot was to make a ring and bezel and set our first stone. Lots of manual fabrication here. Lots. As in:

hammer anneal hammer anneal hammer anneal solder solder swear solder hammer, repeat.

The band in this case sort of wraps around and we had to file notches to accommodate the bezel cup (which is one of the many ways you can set a stone). Now, I wouldn’t normally be sweating what out rightly appeared to be a simple fabrication project, but craftsmanship is the holy word of this school. No gaps.no deviations. no creatively winging-it. The measurements have to be pretty dead on and if it’s over or under what the book says, you get to tweak tweak tweak it until its right or in some cases, you get to start over. Thankfully most of us have discovered the art of patience and doing things step by step to avoid having to completely backpedal and set ourselves back.

My quizzes were pretty good this week. I got a perfect on one quiz, but the one on Thursday I missed 2 questions! And they were the most ridiculous misses! aren’t they always?. None of us were particularly shiny stars this week and we’re all sort of feeling the heat being turned up on the pot of expectation here. We also had our first bench test this past Thursday in which we had to take a rough casting and clean it up and slap a Florentine finish on it. Sounded approachable and no-brainy until I saw the ring. See friend, every project we do has a name, like a customer. This one was called “carries curved ring”. I would like to emphasize the “curved” part of that sentence. Anyway, it had curves in all the weird spots. All the spots that are awkward to file or sand evenly, OH and have I mentioned the florentine finish had to go on one side of the curvy part and took up roughly 30% of the surface of this side? Yeah. OH and it was virtually impossible for me to do this with the ring clamped. So if you looked around during the test you would find us all free handing it and silently mouthing swear words whilst trying not to puncture anything with the ability to bleed with our gravers.

A side note:

There’s a guy in my class who’s in his early 50’s and is funny.so we talk quite a bit. actually, my whole row is comedy relief. Well, one day we were discussing the catalogue the school puts out and how they always have these professional looking students in the photos. We were wondering where they find these said students. So we were trying to figure out how WE would represent the program if they asked US to be in the catalogue.


How would Betsy pose?(channels Kristy)


Results:













Anyway, so i'm still upright after this week. We're all through the "firsts" of most everything and are well aware of of what the expectations are in reagards to our work, quizes and tests. It was hard not knowing what format to expect on some of this simply beacuse you have no idea what or how to study.But now we know. YAR!

next week preview: handling gemstones at the bench! stay tuned for stories of gems flying and students on the ground stone hunting.

in peace and solidarity my friends.
be well.

Jar of rocks and stuff.

I’ve been in metalworking for a few years now. Along the way I’ve picked up good base knowledge of lots of useful things. I can cut, I can file, solder, sand, finish, cast, mold make, polish oh lord can I polish etc etc. Lost somewhere in the nuggets of what I’ve learned were the “little things” I should have learned too. Like the previously mentioned systems of measurement. Or how to do basic things with gravers. Or how to use calipers effectively. All of which would have at some point made me a more effective metalsmith.

All of this occurred to me this past week.

And what ive liked my experience thus far to is this simple analogy (follow me if you will):

I am a jar filled with these rocks of knowledge of what I do, and this school, well, they’re pouring sand into my jar filling in all the gaps with the things I did not know and adding more rocks. And it’s the most amazing feeling to have someone turn on those proverbial light bulbs you knew about, but never fully understood.

Anyone with me?

I’m starting to feel a bit of confidence in my craft. Like I’m being issued dangerous ammunition and weapons to fire it at will. In like 22 weeks or so.

Aside from the revelations…..

This week it picked up drastically and the gap between the people that get it and those that don’t is widening. We had 2 quizes this week and I got a 100% on one and a 94% on the other. one conversion question stopped my brain from operating. Have I mentioned I dislike math?

and I managed to stay on schedule with my projects. In the course of one week we went from learning how to fire up a torch to soldering basics to sizing rings up and down and then we wound this week up with pouring ingots of silver for next weeks 3564 projects that will involve rolling out metal on a rolling mill. On top of all of that we’re learning metal chemistry science!!! *shakes fist at sky* and doing counter sketching a boiled down definition: tiny drawings of jewelery pieces for job purposes and having basic stone essentials facets, anatomy of, sizes, shapes blahblahblah thumped at us.

So while I feel good about knowing most of the stuff, there is certainly this pile of information being dumped and left for each of us to sort through and make sense of. No fear my friends, I am surely getting my moneys worth of knowledge and sleepless evenings.

I study:

• on breaks,
• on my lunch,
• in my car before work
• at home
• and anywhere else that can accomodate me and my books.

I have no life. I havent left the general vicinity of north county for like two weeks. I just drive the loop to school, to work, then home. repeat x5.

And I suspect that this will only amplify as the weeks go on.


There is no doubt in my head that I will come out of here a far better jeweler that when I came in.


Speaking of torches and whatnot, I managed to slide by the whole week without burning myself, but I did manage to slice a nice diagonal pattern into my finger late Wednesday with my saw. Oh and stab myself with a paperclip. True story.

This is what happened to my classmates ring on her first soldering attempt. i told her she should mount this ring in a tiny shadow box and hang it on the wall to always remind herself that we all start somewhere. And perhaps years from now when she's a sucessful jewler/artist, she can look back at that ring and see how far she has come.





We all have proverbial mountains to climb.






melty.


Week four sneek peek: 2 quizzes coming up again and thursday is my first bench test! my goal this next week is to make it five days without slicing, stabbing or burning anything attached to my body. i keep my expectations low in that department to avoid letting myself down.

wish me luck!

Be well.