On list of skills: melting things.

me and my pal Heather. Obviously working hard.

Welcome back, gentle sweet fan club, to the mishy-mashy weekly installment of this thing we call blog. Blog is one of those words that if you say it more then ten times it makes zero sense. Try it.

So this past week was (interestingly enough) pretty easy. And by easy I mean we didn’t have to make any chains or set and marquise. Our first project this week was just a simple set of oval faceted stones set in earrings. The only thing that was challenging for us was assembling the actual earrings. We got two basket-type mounts and had to install a crossbar on the back and make the posts for them, and solder those on and then set the stones. Nothing goes one hundred percent smoothly EVER for anyone here, so this is where I admit that I did (I did) completely melt one cross bar and had to re-do it, and one post while soldering just sort of gave up and collapsed in a melty ball/rod on the back of the earring. Whoops. It was a day project at best which was fine with us. Actually, it was kind of nice to work on something that didn’t make anyone cry.

Project two was a different story. Not that it was hard, its just that things got way smaller. And with jewelry, smaller then humanely possible IS possible. Although this wasn’t THAT small. The project I’m refering to consisted of an emerald cut stone set on a pendant, with three smalllllllll 2.25 mm “diamonds” in a tiny little cluster above it. And they bumped us up to cubic zirconias. Which for us was like going from diapers to pull-ups... But it’s a step in the right direction. This project in theory didn’t seem too hard. I think that it LOOKED more intimidating then it actually was. Just lots of prongs sticking up everywhere waiting for stones. SO the idea was to basically just set all of them properly. Nothing more. But here’s the deal, the instructors emphasized this week that we are very close to the half way mark (in another week or two) and we have all of the skills we need to do the projects, but today is the day to start to really zero in on craftsmanship. He made it very very clear that from here on out, slacking on craftsmanship will be effectively dealt with. With that in mind we all proceeded to take our sweet loving time setting these stones. I cant tell you how slowly I cut the seats for the stones, but all of the parameters for prong height, metal removal and prong contact were met with the help of some long dormant military precision. I also am convinced that I’m going to be in trifocal glasses by July from squinting and straining through my optivisor to see what I’m doing.


Charlie's poop stick flower sculpture. impressive!

I also had a quiz this week. Not so hot. But I passed. I cheered myself up by averaging my quiz scores which ended up being 89%. Which isn’t BAD, but its not as high as I’d like it. Meh. We also had our third bench test this week! All we had to do for this one was assemble a pendant by attaching the split bail and set an oval faceted stone. Easy right? Right! Yay! *insert cheering here*
(moment of silence please)

• Bails I melted or mutilated by accident: 2
• Class average:4

We mangled so many bails Doug had to call down to the metals handlers and get another bag of replacements. I’m proud to announce that I destroyed the very first bail of the day within four and a half minutes of getting it by over-filing it and did the walk of shame to Doug’s desk for a replacement. All of this was accompanied by assorted snickers and giggles from classmates and me silently mouthing bad words at them. All in fun of course. Well jokes on them! By the end of the day our metals check-out sheet had almost everyone’s autograph on it for replacements.

Moving on.

While sitting there filing my eighteenth bail, I overheard Doug tell someone to pay attention to the lower right corner of the job sheet, which of course made me look at MY job sheet. And right there were very subtle instructions to solder the bail on the upper gallery wire. NOW, here’s where I explain that my instinct, as was the rest of the classes, was to solder it to the bottom wire so everything sits flush. So I immediately changed course so I didn’t loose this bail too. If I hadn’t over heard that I would have probably soldered it to the wrong spot and would have gotten an immediate fail for not following the job parameters. Not wanting this to happen to anyone else either, I activated the chain reaction alert warning by nudging my classmate next to me and silently pointing with one of my files to the discrete instruction in the corner. Which compelled her to silently interrupt a classmate about to solder to the wrong spot, which made him check his neighbors which made them check the people near them, and so on and so on. You get the idea. And all of this was done with zero words and lots of charades type acting since we’re not allowed to talk or discuss the project during the exam.

We were allotted four and a half hours to complete the entire thing, and I completed mine in three hours and 20 minutes. Like I said before, I took my sweet loving time and the end result was probably my best stone set yet. The prongs went down like butter and could have been more huggy with the stone then they were. No gaps, no “nitpickers”, table of the stone was dead even and you cant find a tool mark on that thing if you tried. So yay me. I obviously don’t have the grade yet for it, but I feel good about the work I did and like to think that if this were an actual job, this would have been completed successfully.

Completely unrelated to school, I have to tell you all this. It happened at my job the other day. I was lamenting to a coworker about how I missed Italian beef sandwiches , wet soggy dipped with sweet peppers, cheese and a side of juice mmmmm and I cant find anything like that up here… and she said “what’s an Italian beef?”
WHAT!!
So I described to her what it was and she’d never had one. I felt obligated to take a survey at work at this point to see if this were her problem or if this was a true tragedy among SoCal natives. It turns out the only other person I work with who knew what a delicious Italian beef sandwich was was the one guy from the east coast. I feel like I have to save these people now. I know that theres a true Chicago beef joint in east county because an old navy buddy of mine (from Chicago too) told me about it and said it’s the only place out here she can find. And the guy that owns it packed up shop back home and trucked out here to get away from the snow. i can relate. SO I think I’m going to find this place, eat there, then load up the back of my truck with a dozen or so varieties of Italian beefs and bombers and introduce my tanned friends to some artery clogging deliciousness.

In their defense, I had no idea what a California burrito was. Which they did not understand either. And its apparently a burrito with the delicious addition of French fries inside. that’s it. But it sounds good!

Next week is week twelve AND next Friday is my birthday! I’ll be uh.. 27 for the 7th year in a row. I will be going out of town next weekend with my roomie who’s birthday is the day after mine for a little well needed R&R to celebrate. So if I write a blog for the week, it will either be posted very early, or late. Hang in there!

Until next time friends, be well.

Word of the day: HOWEVER.

WELCOME TO THE NOVELLA THAT IS WEEK TEN! Grab a hot cup of coffee and bring your thinking caps, friends.

I left off last week discussing the intricacies of chain making. And I believe that I may have discussed how time consuming this project was. Well, it was. Now, up until the end of that project, I was led to believe that chain making may be one of the time consuming aspects of this field.

HOWEVER…..

We all wound up the chain at some point on Monday. For most of us we came crashing into the finish line with sweat pouring from our brows and victory grins on our faces throwing high fives at each other ten minutes before the end of class. Fine. Totally fine. Nothing like a little unit cohesion now and then. We’re a team after all.

NOW. The second project….. Mrs. Millers Charm. So ok, here’s were I reflect momentarily on past blogs. I am full aware that every week I say something about the difficulty level of the said project we’re working on, and lament my mistakes or frustrations. And I appreciate all of the careful lessons I learn along the way. As a matter of fact I CRAVE those lessons, as it is a reason I am here, right? So upping the difficulty level only intensifies my frustration AND my need/desire to do much better, stronger work then I did on the last project. With that said…… The charm.....

This project involved producing a heart shaped charm (two identical halves) and mounting a bezel set marquise in the center of it. This is again, one of those deceptively simple sounding tasks we all thought would take us a couple days max and we’d move on. Not so, ladies and gentleman. Not so.

We had to start the project by making a practice bezel on this brass mounting thingy. We were told that if we made this one well, we could use it on the charm. Also included in that lecture was the warning that setting the marquise like this is misleadingly simple, and to think think think about how the stone is shaped, and to take that into consideration when cutting the seat, adjusting the bezel blahblahblah. *brushes off instructors 30 years of experience and warning with wave of hand*…..We of course all took off with our tiny chunks of stock and proceeded to act like we knew what the hell we were doing since we're masters at this, right?

Here’s how I did on the practice bezel. I got the thing formed to my stone, so I had to solder the seams on it. I did one side of it just fine. I flipped the thing over to do the remaining seam... and three milliseconds before I dropped the solder on it, half of the bezel took off like a NASA space shuttle launch and flew to my right. Just pinged off. So I swing to my right to find it on the floor sizzling its way through the industrial carpeting. Fire extinguisher of choice: Chuck Taylor’s. Here’s the kicker. That was only HALF of the half melting its way through the carpet. I still cant find the other quarter of that first bezel. Ha! AND THEN on my second bezel attempt I got it made just fine. I got the seat cut. I popped the stone in and set the bezel. Awesome! So at this point all I have to do is heat it up, remove it from the brass thingy and set it aside. Right? NOT SO FAST superwoman! I fired up my torch, took the thing off and right as I was singing praises to my classmate about my bezel, I instinctively (bad insticts by the way) chucked this thing into my water jar….WHICH, if it had no stone would have been fine, but thermal shock does a doozy on fragile things.. See, its pure common sense. You take something (a coffee pot, a dish from the oven, a diamond) heat it up to high temps and submerge it in something far cooler then the air, lets say, you get a broken what-ever-you-submerged. So tossing it in the water was like a slow motion nightmare for me. Because when you quench something it makes this distinctive sizzle-ping sound, and this sound and that moment of realization as to what I’d done caused my head to bang on my bench a few times. I completely fractured the stone. Solution: we obliterated the stone by satisfactorily hammering the thing into dust, and luckily my bezel was ok, so I was able to pop another stone right in and adjust the bezel. Amen. HOWEVER, when I reset the bezel I had to sink it in the poop stick, ok? So when I heated up the crap to remove the bezel, it sank, I tried to grab it with my tweezers, and it sank more, I panicked and watched as it turned on its side and resembled a scaled version of the sinking of the Titanic. When I DID get it out of the goo, it was coated and stuck to my tweezers. Time in acetone: 45 minutes. Set back: 1 hour. But this wasn’t just my disease friends, three other of my classmates did the exact same thing and within minutes of me doing it, which created an impromptu lecture on thermal shock. You’re welcome, busy classmates! My pal Charlie had a similar experience with completing his bezel, and then went to take the thing off the brass but managed to heat the bezel quicker than the brass which promptly melted and resulted in a perfect bezel being reduced to a tiny abstract sculpture. What to do? Start over! The average number of bezels crated and destroyed seems to be three. Some did five. I did 2.

Needless to say, this deviously simple looking task took most of us all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday to complete. The remaining part of the charm was also a bit tricky since it involved forming two pieces of wire into the exact same shape. Some creative variances were allowed. The first half was the easiest to form, but it was matching the second half to the first exactly that took the longest amount of time. BUT in comparison to making the bezel, it was a job all of us were equipped to handle well. The only tricky part was filing your angles correctly. Other than that, it went well! Time of completion: 13 hours on the dot. see: the back of my job card.

So week ten is over and we’re officially into the double digit weeks. Week 11 is yet another quiz, which we’re all just praying to pass, and my third bench test is on Thursday. I should be having another one-on-one meeting sometime week 12 to let me know my standing in the class. Stay tuned for a progress report! Next week we shove forward into setting more fancy cuts! Whoot!

The sun is shining, its Easter and I have the day off and my sunscreen on, see you next week my friends!

Be well!

Working on the chain gang, yay-eee-yayyy

Goodness the weeks are flying by!

This week presented a few new challenges for us which I welcomed with my usual dose of optimism and eager curiosity. I’m here to learn right? just call me sponge.

Our first tackle this week was a mans ring with a low bezel set “diamond” read: spinell since we’re still too new at setting for anyone at this respectable institution to hand us anything of value. Some people are still hammering like cavemen with clubs. Its completely understandable.The ring itself had a nice design with lots of soothing rigid crisp lines and grooves. Easy to file=low blood pressure. We had to set two stones total. The first stone was the smallest they’ve tasked us with so far, which was a 3mm, and we had to make the bezel for it, set, finish and do a bright cut. Then we had to get it signed off complete, go back, heat the damn thing up and remove that one, make a bezel for the modest 5.25 mm, solder, drill the seat which consequently widens the hole in the base of the ring for the stone, set that stone, finish completely and then turn in. Which I think took me about 10 or so hours of class to do. Keep in mind we make nearly everything from scratch, aside from the actual ring. And with 17 people on two rolling mills, it makes sense. Plus ive never done that type of setting. But as it turns out , I prefer bezel setting to prong any day.

Project 2 this week, which is flowing halfassedly into Monday of next week is “Kim Kelly’s chain”. It’s a 31 (oval) link bracelet with a sister hook. Here’s what my project bag came with:

• three feet of uninteresting wire,


• one flat 1”x1” sheet of metal,


• a tiny dinky linked safety chain


• and a pattern for the hook.


• Oh and some metal tube for the rivet for the hook.

I wouldn’t say that I was “excited” about this project, but I understand in order to move forward in life, one must tackle some unpleasantries along the way. Chaing making isn’t hard. I’m not complaining about that. What I dislike about it is it’s small and its hard to clean up and polish. Oh and the links are small. And they’re hard to hold because they’re small. Small things are hard to polish. Small small small small. My hands are still recovering this morning from being clenched up for two straight days. Seriously.

With this particular bracelet, you had to take the three feet of wire, trim it into three 1 foot sections, anneal it and then wind up each section on your oval link mandrel WHICH I insert, we had to make before starting this project. Then you have to saw each link off, true them up, solder roughly half together, link them in groups, link the groups to other groups repeat repeat until you have formed a chain. THEN you get to clean the little small tiny chain up. Good luck I say. Good luck. I’m still in progress with the bracelet and will be assembling my hook and safety chain Monday. SO maybe by next week I’ll have a picture for you. But I’ve clearly decided that if anyone asks me to make them a chain (pay attention here) ever, its going to cost like, $300 just to get me to consider making it. If you’re ok with that, well then, a-chain-a-making I will be!
sister hook example.

Overall this week was pretty cool. We got yet another instructor, Real Doug. There are 2 Doug instructors in the building. Real Doug has been there longer. Faux Doug has only been teaching there a little while. This guy’s pretty neat in his own way. You can tell he’s been doing this for a long time just because he has a bench tip for everything. And he has more handmade and altered tools then regular ones. He’s a very steady and knowledgeable man and again, I’m looking forward to picking his brain.

Injury tally week 9: (the category has expanded to include other body parts)

• (karmic) Diagonal slice on hand with 4/0 saw blade while laughing at classmate: 1
• Hands atrophied in the clench position: 2
• Neck spasms due to hovering over small chain links: 4
• Wrist pings: 1,256
  
  
  I know I say this every week, but it’s nuts how much we’re doing. Sometimes its hard for me to wrap my head around this school and the fact that I’m finally here doing this. I could have made a better decision to throw caution to the wind and come here. Its like every single day I feel blessed to be surrounded by so much talent, so much love from my family and friends, the support. Its humbling me in so many ways. I am so grateful. I am so grateful. I am so grateful. I write this blog because of that.

Next week we move into the double digit weeks! Week 10! Dang!
Until next week, be well.

Lac bugs and rump shakin'

If I had to choose one word to use to describe this week, it would be awesome.

Awesome as defined: used as a general term of enthusiastic approval (slang)

We started this week with a new instructor, Adam. We will only have him for 2 weeks, roughly, then on to another instructor. It turns out that Jerry was the longest we’ll have one instructor for. They’ll apparently be rotating in many over the remaining 17 or so weeks depending on the projects we’re working on. Which, for me, was great news. I value above most things: variety... so having multiple opinions and insights from various professionals is what I’m excited about. Its keeping me on my toes!
Now this guy…. He’s at the top of my list of favorites BECAUSE he plays music I enjoy during class. You name it, I liked it. Bjork, Beck, Beatles, Alison Krauss, Led Zepplin, Prodigy, some assorted ambient techno-y stuff, Imogene Heap, and consequently Frou Frou, Sia and so on and so on. Here is where I insert my opinion on productivity and the general social atmosphere due to good music. Music changes people. This week was awesome in that regard. Everyone up until this week was so focused on learning the basics, concentrating on mastering technique and being very self-involved. The difference this week and I credit the good music for this is that everyone was STILL doing all of that, we were just interacting with each other more. The people that never talk to us, talked. The people that isolate themselves weekly, opened up, searched out solutions from other classmates, stayed on campus during lunch, joined in friendly debates over tools and techniques. Adam roamed the class all day doling out advice and offering pointers. We all swapped music tastes, emails, phone numbers. Awesome. It was relatively ground breaking, and I credit music for assisting in that breakthrough. Its universal isn’t it? It evokes emotion, generates good vibes. I remember the studio at NIU being very drab and bleak to hang out in sometimes, but when my friends sending tiny shout out to kristy for her heavy rotation of rad music and dan for turning me on to beth orton! holla! plopped in a CD and fired up the coffee pot, the mood changed. Much the same here, just no coffee pot. $%#@%$

Mid week we got a guy named Steve for one project, Mrs. Iggys Earring Jackets. Before I continue on, I would like to just toss it out there that I have no problem with earring jackets as a whole, just these particular jackets. The idea with these was to take two sheets of metal (silver), cut out 2 bottom pieces, 2 top, precision file them, fit them together and solder. The deal with the project lies in the actual finishing of it. See, the idea here is to create these sort of organic looking, three dimensional flowy sort of jackets out of flat, uninteresting metal. So the challenge was to use assorted gravers to carve, carve I say, the metal into these interestingly curvy things. At the base of each curve it had to be 50% removal of metal and graduated up to the original height. Luckily we only had to carve one section, the rest we could use files on, but ddddaaaaaaaannnnnggggit, it was hard. You can do all of this well, carving and whatnot, but the FINISHING of this piece was impossible. Or it felt that way. I decided that they designed this project to specifically set us up for failure. doesn’t matter how good you are, the things going to be weird looking when you get done. and by wierd i mean something juuuuuuust doesnt look right. lopsided. it does not mat-ter how nice you carve it, when you pumice or polish it, it will reveal tiny scratches, bumps, uneven surfaces and unsavory dings. There’s this undercut on these jackets that’s nearly impossible and downright inhumane to try and sand, so I whooped out the pin vice and tossed in a tiny sewing needle to get in there and burnish, and what happens? I slip, and the tinytinytiny needle makes a nice tinytinytiny groove on the front of the jackets. What to do? Step backwards my friends. Resand. Burnish more. Create a more unnatural surface (more organic and flowing I say) complete with more waves, bumps and aforementioned uneven surfaces. Vicious cycle! Fuck up, re-do, get to the point you’re alllllmost done, fuck up, repeat as necessary. swear.
I did get them done though. And I’ve said this before, sometimes good enough is good enough. I’m glad that Mrs. Iggy doesn’t exist, and if she DID and I had to make these, I’d cast them and eliminate the crying and panic my entire class experienced with these things.

If you’re wondering how you hold a small piece of metal to carve it (I know you were), you use what’s called a shellac stick. Which explained simply is a chunk of stick with some hard plastic-y type goop on top that you can heat up and sink your tiny piece into, which when cooled, hardens to create a stable surface to work on.

Now.

Shellac. I know what the stuff is generally. Its hard plastic-y stuff, right? Right. Welllll, Orange (in our case) flake shellac, as defined by our midweek instructor Steve, is basically bug poop. Poop! You heard me. I had no idea. None. I did do some research and by research i mean i googled shellac and read like one or two articles becasue my attention span spans three and a half minutes MAX and its a secretion (poo) of the Lac bug. looks like a beetle. If y'all care to google it, do so. i've been side-eyeballing the varnish finish on all of my furniture since i read about it. BACK TO SHELLAC: So, gentle reader, we sink your precious tiny things into poo. Ok ok ok, so its mixed with other stuff I imagine, but its still what it is. But its totally safe and makes a hell of a piece holder. I cant tell you how many poop jokes we had going around the class, but there were many. Poop sticks, shit sticks etc. poking each other in the back of the head with them. What is it about the idea of a stick with what amounts to beetle dung on it that turns and entire class full of adults into five year olds that giggle at the mention of the word?


me and charlie with poop sticks

Back to Mrs. Iggy…. She took me a total of 9 hours and 5 minutes to fabricate. I think that trumps the flat pierced earrings we did last week that took me about 7 hours of work to do. As a matter of fact, that beats Mrs. Whatsherface’s thingy I made one of the last couple weeks. What a blur. I don’t even know what project we’re on anymore, but last time I looked, which was last week some time we’d passed project # 18 or something. So I imagine we’re on #20, give or take a piece or two.
Anyway, this weeks been great! The mood has shifted this week into something far more unified then it has been prior. Maybe its just my perception of what’s happening, but I don’t think you can fake that kind of good vibe with any group of people. I also think that it helped when we all figured out that we’re a third of the way through the program, and while 6 months seems long to some, to us it’s the most accelerated amazingly slow sobering liberating six months of our lives and we’re inhaling every moment.

Onward to week 9!
Until next week my friends, be well.

Coughs, sniffles and earrings

I would like to start this entry to what I akin to an Oscars speech. I fell moderately ill the beginning of the week and I wouldn’t have hacked my way through it if it weren’t for the following:

• to roomie for hooking me up with Dayquil and cookies. yum.
• to my classmate who insisted on mom'ing me on break and forced me to drink EmergenC and a bottle of water.
• to the people that make Advil liquid gels.
• my left over supply of pharmacy issued pseudoephidrine (sp?) for clearing my sinuses
• my buddy in class who donated a pile of Kleenex to my runny nose.
• the makers of ultra soft Kleenex.
• my mom for calling me right about the time I was feeling like I needed some mom.
• the girl at Juice It Up who hooked me up with a double shot of wheatgrass because she felt bad for me
• my coworker that also insisted on mom'ing me and giving me yet another EmergenC AND two green tea teabags and attempted to give me more Advil.
• my classmates for not killing me for coughing on them.
• and my coworkers too.
• Progresso Italian vegetable soup.
• The roll of toilet paper I confiscated from the bathroom

Thank you. Thank you all for your support. This week couldn’t have happened without your teamwork and sympathy.

Needless to say, this week was sort of foggy with my head being mildly detached from the rest of me. One seat for me, one for my head.

I made my way through a few sets of earrings this week. Lots of assembling of pieces to form a whole piece. The first set of earrings we did consisted of cutting wire, forming posts and soldering them to the heads, then cutting the seats for the stones, setting the stones and shaping the prongs. Sounds simple enough until you consider how small the things are and how difficult it proved to cut seats on the heads while holding them pinched between your fingers. For the record I got a great grade on them, but this set DID come back to me for a correction. What’s that correction you ask? Well, under a 10x loupe, my instructor saw one miniscule grain of polishing compound, which I apparently missed on my final inspection, and I had to re-clean them for a CS grade. Other than that they turned out great. The next set of earrings, which took the remainder of the week to do by the way, were a mirror image set. Essentially we had to take a sheet of metal, cut and pierce the design out, form the earring hooks out of wire, precision cut and file them exactly the same (and I mean when you placed them back to back they had to look like one piece of metal). I wont try and explain how hard this is. Its hard. Every cut a made on one earring had me double checking the other to make sure the design stayed the same. Verrrrrrrry easy to deviate and take filing or sanding liberties and completely skew the design. And then once all of that was done we had to solder the wires on, and polish them to a mirror finish WITHOUT getting any drag lines from the polisher on them. Again, one of those tasks that’s interesting to attempt and harder to do.

I also had my second JMA bench exam. Up the ante my friends. This consisted of assembling and engagement ring from the ground up. So in the baggies our test came in were the following: one split gold band, one white gold head, one 5.25 mm round brilliant cut stone.

Here’s what I had to do:

I had to file each side of the band to perfect 60 degree angles to fit the 6 prong head. Solder the head on with no gaps, no pits and in the accurate upright position (ive soldered a couple crooked in my day). Then we had to cut the seat, clean the prongs up, set the stone, file the prongs to the appropriate contact level, shape them, then resize the ring to a dainty 4 ½. So here is when tell you that during the exams we can ask questions to our instructor , but he can provide us no direct answers as to how to do something. If that makes sense. So when I asked him if I should set the stone first then size the ring or size it then set it, he sort of smiled and said “I can only tell you that I would like the stone set and the ring at a 4 ½, so go in whatever order makes sense to you”. I immediately had flashbacks to a friend of mine resizing one particualr ring with like 27 tiny diamonds in them and having to crawl around the floor looking for them because they fell out of their seats because the ring went down so many sizes..... Anyway, i went with the resize BEFORE setting the stone and it provided me an opportunity to adjust the prongs and set the stone securely instead of skewing the ring in such a drastic size down and risk loosening the setting. I got the exam back on Friday and I got an “E” on the exam, which is the highest grade, but I do have some things I have to work on a bit. An E is and E sometimes though! i'll take it!

final product!

This week was Jerry’s last week with us. Apparently every 6-7 weeks or so we’ll be getting a new instructor. Jerry’s heading to finish up a class he started 5 months ago and see them off. I don’t know who we’re getting on Monday, but I hear he’s funny and challenging. I’m excited to have a fresh perspective and new set of eyes on my work. I hope I can continue to live up to my expectations and the new instructors as well.

me and Jerry!

On to week 8! (dang!) until next week my friends,

Be well.