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.