Teenage awkwardness: over.

My teenage weeks have come to a close! I kind of feel like how I (vaguely) remember the day I left teenage awkwardness behind and entered into my awkward twenties. Which never actually changed anyone physically, but admit it! Something liberating happens that day.. Its that feeling I have right now. It feels good, except I’m not quite home free YET. We’re trotting around a well worn home stretch curve here, the finish line in our sights, but we’ve been running so damn long that we’re all somewhat exhausted. Desperately trying to find that eighth wind to propel us to that line. Its one of those moderately momentous feelings that maybe only holds significance for those of us caught in this particular race, but it’s a good feeling.

Don Hughes is our newest and final instructor who will see us on to graduation in about 6 ½ weeks. He’s been teaching here for about 10 years roughly. Its always a different experience adjusting to a new way of teaching, but I couldn’t be more pleased with his methods. Not only is this guy GOOD at teaching, he’s really hands on to the point that he’ll get you out of your seat and either sit down at your bench and show you new tricks, or drag you to the dry erase board to illustrate it, or to the computer to show you things or just give you a short one on one lecture about how you can improve what you’re doing. Its pretty cool. In one week I’ve already had the light shed on me four or five times. I dig the interaction he gives.

One of the first projects we did this week was simple band with a tiffany head set in it. Does anyone know what a tiffany head is (Kristy is exempt from answering)? I’ll try and explain it simple terms without launching into the history of it. Ok. It’s a talllll setting that launches your diamond way up into the air. Its tall. Really tall. Almost to the point that its impractical for most people to wear because it WILL snag on anything and everything at some point. But it’s a great setting if you have an amazing blazing fire and sparkle diamond you want to show off because setting is elevated and open between the prongs which allows the maximum amount of light into the stone. *lesson over* Anyway. So we had to set this 6 prong tiffany in the shank, set a 5.25 mm stone and get that checked. Then we got to heave that stone out and set a SMALLER stone, about 4 mm. which was interesting to do because you had to adjust the prongs to accommodate the smaller stone, then re-cut them juuuust so. Pretty cool, but sort of standard issue work for us!

The second project that we were given this week (number 43) was the “Aztec charm” moreaffectionately referred to as the Aztec hubcap. Or Aztec spaceship. Or ugly-ass pendant, depending on who you were talking to… Nothing in particular attracted me to this project other that the fact that it was hand fabricated, which I enjoy doing. Otherwise it’s sort of an ugly design, and ugly jewelry is uninspiring to work on. And for whatever reason, they gave us three days to do this thing. So I took my time trying to get this thing to look good. I even took some creative liberties on the back of the piece because I disagreed with its chunky backside. Hope I don’t get this one back for non-compliance. I reasoned that this is one of my keepers and if I have to have this thing in my portfolio, I don’t want ugly, you know? I also reasoned that I only have to be at 75% completion to graduate and I’m at 100% now, so I can afford to side-eye this project if I want to. I don’t have a picture of it because I was so happy to have it done and off my bench that I skipped the pictures. Maybe when I get it back I’ll take one just so you can all see what I’m talking about. All I could think about when I was working on this was how I’d like to be the one to redesign this pendant. Seriously. Ok so it’s a round domed pendant with a bezel set black stone. It has this hideous Aztec pattern pierced around it. I don’t have anything against the actual pattern, but it was a very unharmonious design. Keep you posted on the design deviations and non compliance!

I DID however, get a picture of that man ring I burned my finger working on. Enjoy!

This week we also discussed our next bench test which is Thursday. I like that the last few exams we’ve been briefed on what to expect. It gives us plenty of time to get panic and crying out of the way before we work on it. Who read my blog on the free form remount? Remember the curvy flowy ring with three heads I had to set? Yeah. Our bench test is THAT remount. Here’s what he said: We get that ring back, we’ll have to pull the stones, remove the heads, clean it up, solder in three NEW heads and set three NEW stones, which of course will be completely different sizes than the originals. Awesome! I can already guarantee that next weeks blog will include a lengthy and colorful paragraph on it. Stay tuned!

We also discussed the final bench exam a bit. Which of course isn’t happening for another 6 weeks but again, its handy to have a heads up. Ok, so when you look at the syllabus it shows three days for the bench exam. Three. So we were all sort of thinking that we’d have three days to complete it. No. no, we’re wrong. We have three attempts to complete it. It’s a one day bench exam. And he showed us a rough cast of the ring we’ll be setting ohhhhhh 5 or so heads in. Yes kids, it’s a fu**ing remount on speed. One day to do this! And here’s the best part! If you jack this ring up, mangle, mutilate, melt or disfigure the ring, you get to leave and come back the next day to attempt it again. Why? Because you only get one day to do this. There’s no point in starting over at noon when you’ll only have three hours to complete it. No roll-over-to-the-next-day on this. GAH! And they have a team of instructors that will be grading the ring RIGHT THERE so you’ll know if you need to come back the next day or not. And this isn’t including the final written exam. I cant tell you how instantly stressed out hearing that made me, but they do it for a reason. They’re trying to stress time management and quality here. In this field, sometimes you have to be fast AND good at the same time and the luxury of taking you time isn’t always afforded to you. So they’re trying to turn the heat up in regards to how long projects take you and whatnot. I felt bad for some of the people in my class because you could TELL what they were thinking. These are the people that are 4,5 or 6 projects behind and work incredibly slow. A one day exam will be a challenge for all of us.

In other news, I met Don Johnson yesterday at my job when he came in to shop. Anyone over the age of 27 remembers Miami Vice right?


Until next week my friends, be well.

flippin the bird to burns

Roses are Red,
Violets are Blue,
I burned my middle finger. Appropriate.

A few days ago I was rooting through some stuff looking for something that still eludes me and I ran into a stack of “roses are red” poems an old flame (and amazing friend!!) of mine used to write for each other . Which pretty much go like that. They don’t rhyme and the only prose requisite its seemed was that they had to start with the first two lines of the poem and you can pretty much write whatever you want after that. Anyway, it may or may not be funny to anyone else but me, but I laughed myself to tears the other day reading them.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Moving on.

book charm from last weeks blog!

Channel set!Week eighteen. Monday morning came equipped with a new concept to wrap our weekend foggy brains around. Remounts. A remount is exactly what it sounds like. You’re the customer, you have grandmas diamond ring, a loose ruby, and a couple worn out rings and you want all of the stones yanked and reset in one ring. Remounts. Wah-lah. So we learned about how the process works, lectured on remount , how to approach it blahblahblah and then we were given a very curvy (sooo curvy) freeform ring, three heads and three stones: one pear shaped fancy and two different sized round brilliant cuts. The goal here was to modify the ring to accommodate these heads so that the stones were set in an aesthetically pleasing manner. When all of that was completed, we got to cut it up and half-shank it. I wish I had a picture of this ring because the thing looked like a tiny rollercoaster with its dips, curves and swoopy parts. Getting a head to sit upright and not tilted involved careful filing, some flex-shaft cone bur action, soft quiet tears of pleading, three Hail Mary’s and one stone setting bur to get a cozy curve cut for the pear head. Pear head. Ha-ha. So here’s how it went down. I got the pear head soldered in. Then I moved to the larger of the RBC heads and got that soldered in. It was when I was juuuuuuuust getting the solder on the third head flowing that the second head heated up just enough and dropped off the ring and clinked across my solder pad. I just sat there in disbelief for like thirty seconds looking at it. Much to my budding professional pleasure, I’ve eloquently moved from belting out “What the FUCK??!???!“ to: “you have GOT to be KIDDING me!” when something goes wrong. I got the second head in again, but I had to do a little maintenance on it to get it back in. Add half hour to work time for clean up, re-filing, and re-soldering. We were allotted two days for this project which came and went far more rapidly then we anticipated. By the end of Tuesday I had the heads in, the stones set and prongs shaped, but didn’t have the half-shank done. *sets project aside* Completed this one later on Friday after I completed the next project. Pictures next week!

Wednesday wasn’t too bad. Our next project was a men’s ring with a 9 stone pin plate soldered on it. This one was pretty easy since all we had to do was solder the plate on, size the ring up to a 12 from a 9 ½ and then set the stones and do a Florentine finish on specific parts of the sides of the ring. I’m finding that all of the projects we’ve been working on lately have involved us making this beautiful piece of jewelry, all shiny and glossy diamond-ness AND THEN having to willingly destroy parts of it to “simulate” wear and do the appropriate repairs on it. (Which is cool, but it inevitably leaves you praying that you don’t F*** up the repair because if you do, you get to roll back to square one. No good.) Once we got done setting all 9 stones in this ring and had a high polish on it, we got to file two prongs flat and re-tip them. Ok, now, 9 stones with 4 prongs each equals 36 prongs to choose from. I took the easy road out of hell and did two of the outside corner prongs. I reasoned that these would probably wear first AND they’re the easiest to get to. *taps noggin with finger and smiles*

Higrading stones!

Bonus injury side story: so when I was soldering the plate into the ring, I was using these large tweezers to sort of steady the plate so when the solder flowed I could just give it a little pressure and guide it down. NOW... When I was adjusting the tweezers position I noticed that they kept sticking to the plate because the ends were sorta gunky from the flux. This is not OK because I do not want them to pull the plate up AT ALL EVER, So I spin them around to use the wider, non-gunky, non-business end for the plate pushing action. Solder flows and I am happy. I put the tweezers down without incident and shut off my torch and hang it up. It is then that I absentmindedly grabbed the 1,567 degree handle of my just heated tweezers with my right hand. One “HOLY F**KING SH**!!!” and some burn cream later I was pleased to discover that it only really affected my middle finger. I was sharing my burn story with some classmates when my buddy V raised his right hand to show me the burn outline of the entire handle of his tweezers singed on the palm of his hand. He had done the same thing, only worse.

If you look close, right above my ring you'll see burn indents.

Thursday we took our class picture. It is one of the rare days I dressed up because I had to, and certainly not because I was willing, but because it was required. It’s like wrestling a small child into eating brussel sprouts, I always like being dressed up once I am, its just getting me IN to the clothes is an issue. We took two pictures, one serious businesslike picture and then one funny picture. The funny one found me in a luxurious white feather boa, my buddy Chuck in a coconut bra and grass skirt, O in a princess hat with flowing purple tulle, R looked like she was heading to the Kentucky Derby in a large brimmed hat and elbow high white gloves and H’s face was jammed into a large Statue of Liberty full face foam hat. Doug, our instructor was forced to wear my feathery pirate hat while V, who wore his notorious bike helmet and held a fake parrot near Doug’s shoulder. It wad a lot of fun and once I get the pictures back I’ll try and post them! Until then here’s some that I took.









Next week we gain a new instructor. I don’t remember his name but I believe that he’s the one that will see us through to graduation in 8 weeks! So I’m nervous again about another set of eyes on my work, but looking forward to the stream of critique I’ve come accustomed to the last 18 weeks. I only hope that my work continues to live up to expectations! Thats all i got!

Until next week, be well my friends!

wounds, rivets and other headaches

As I have suspected and expected, the projects just keep getting more challenging and tedious as the weeks climb closer to graduation. We’re on like, project 41 or something now. We have to do 54. So with some simple math you know that in 17 weeks we’ve completed about 2 ½ projects a week. Roughly. So with about 13 left for the duration of the class that’s about 1 ¾ a week. WHICH means they’re not only getting harder, but taking longer to finish.

This week we made the previously mentioned “Zelda Zelinsky” book charm. This was a hinged (cringe) book shaped charm with a catch on it that is supposed to “snap” into place when you close it (mine sort of “thuds” closed) and has four star-set stones the size of my pupil on a bright blinding sunny day. The stones are set in a strip of metal that was also riveted (to the cover) and we were left up to our own devices for a finishing texture.
Star set example:

Project bag contents: one sheet of metal, one tiny metal tube and some wire. And a thousand tiny stones.

It wouldn’t have been so bad to make if I had superhero magna-vision and could zoom in on this with my own eyes, but things being what they were had me eyeballing this project through an optivisor for three days straight and consequently Im certain that I’m going blind. What I’ve decided I need are some magnification goggles that rival the ones the surgeons wear in Grey’s Anatomy.

The project itself was basic construction, so it wasn’t that bad. BUT, Instead of soldering on the decorative strip like the book said, we riveted it on (as previously mentioned) WHICH threw the intructions way out of whack. There were like, 4 pages of instructions for this project and since we eliminated the one section and did it different, it completely changed the course of how we all got this done. It was the first project where we were all sitting there looking at the book like it was written in hieroglyphics. Consequently, almost the entire projects steps of construction were left up to us. Which was fine, since it got us all roaming around the room to see how everyone else was approaching it. It got done, that’s all I can say about it.

The second project we worked on this week was a 7 stone channel set ring. We were given a 14KT ring and 7 stones and a 2.5 nano-second lecture on how to set these. Doug basically said that we have all the tools we need to do this project, and to just do it. We were only shown how to tighten the stones once we set them. Once the 7 stones were in place, we had to get the ring checked and signed off, then we got to step-size the ring down from a 7 ½ to a 5 ¾…. Step sizing is done in roughly half size increments. So you take the ring from 7 ½ to a 7, solder, round out, check stones, then cut it open again, take it down to a 6 ½, solder, round out, check stones, repeat. This process allows you to take a ring with lots of stones down to a certain size without wholly compromising the setting and risking having stones pop out. It wasn’t hard, just annoying. I was lucky to not have any stones clink out, but I did have to retighten a few here and there which I expected.

I received a few projects back this week with great grades. The one I wasn’t surprised about getting back with some pointers was that circle pendant with the 24 stones set in it. Apparently, despite my caution and tiny tiny flame tip, I managed to torch one of the stones. I cooked it, kids. OH and I was so over the project I turned it in with like, three loose stones. SO, to correct this I had to pop a new stone in, and tighten a few others and I got the incomplete grade reversed. It took 10 minutes to do. Lesson learned: if I had taken an additional 10 minutes to relax and check my work before hastily tossing it in the project box, I would have been able to correct this from the get go! My 5th bench test came back a shining star! I got marked off for microscopic tool marks (which I had to hunt for with a loupe up underneath the ring by the way) but still got an E on it. Whew!

I did manage to stab myself a few times with my dividers this week. How? *shrugs* I also smashed the back of my hand on my bench pin. Nothing permanently debilitating, although I did get shit from my 16 year old bench buddy for being so willy-nilly with my tools. Here's why i keep a hand injury tally, folks.

Another bench tip from me to you…. We use acetone for a variety of things, including removing shellac (poop) from our work. We also have a toothbrush we use for cleaning delicate pieces that cannot go into the ultrasonic machine for cleaning. And that toothbrush is meant for the ultrasonic machine specifically. Not the acetone. Why cant we interchange them you ask? Because. Acetone is basically nail polish remover. What does nail polish remover do to plastic items like nail polish and toothbrushes if you leave them in the acetone? They melt. Seriously. This is what I discovered chilling in the acetone jar when I went over to use it.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you our acetoned toothbrush:

Needless to say we got a new one. Which was overdue anyway I suppose. So thank you to which ever bright classmate of mine did this.

Not much else going on out my way this week. We have May 26th off from school so I’m trying to figure out something relatively cool to do for the weekend that doesn’t involve money or gas. Neither of which I have an abundance of to waste. Any ideas?

To all the moms out there: Happy Mothers Day!!!

Until next week my friends, be well.

BONUS BLOG and its only Monday....

Dear god(dess) of choice,i hate hinges. have i mentioned that?

• OH and i hate riveting too, which we're doing on this new project.

In other news he said we have three days for this, to which half the class snorted and chuckled. myself included.

stay tuned.

Woo! Woo!

Week sixteen has come to an end, my friends. The increase of the weeks is accompanied by the pleasant decrease in the number of weeks left of class, which of course means that I’m happy to announce that we move into the single digit weeks as of Monday. Only 9 of ‘em left! I’ve decided that after school is over it’d be a shame to leave all of you dangling, so I may continue to write this blog to sort of record my job hunting adventures. Although I cannot guarantee that I’ll be so diligent about the weekly posts. May be a bit more sporadic my friends.

Moving on.

Ok. Well this week we did 2 things. One was the tackling of “Wanda Woo’s Wedding Band” and the other was bench exam #5. That’s it. Monday we started Wanda with our usual round of Monday enthusiasm and optimism (pause, insert deadpan stare) ….SO, I like to explain to you what our project bags come with sometimes because I want you all to understand what is involved in these projects a bit more. I don’t want everyone to assume that we get a sack of pre-manufactured parts and all we do is assemble them.

No no, dear ones, no no.

The Wanda Woo project bag contained the following items:
-One bag of casting grain (which for all practical purposes a crap-ton of tiny metal pebbles)
-One round brilliant cut
Period.

The short story of how this ring is made is this: We had to melt the metal and pour and ingot (see blogs 1-4 for reference), roll the thing into specific sized stock (which involves annealing, rolling, annealing, rolling, annealing, rolling and annealing some more) and then making a simple band. From there you marked this thing everywhere. We scribed lines to divide it into quarters, halves, 45 degree angles and then had to file a specific taper on the band. And by specific I mean in millimeters:

Once that was done you had to make into what’s called a knife edge. So instead of the ring being like a half round shape, both sides of the ring come to a very defined line. You’ll see what I mean in the picture. Sorta. So once that was done then we had to fabricate a stepped bezel out of the remaining stock. (this is so hard to explain) which is essentially a round tube of metal with a smaller round tube of metal soldered inside of it. Ok, so once we had that done we had to cut our precisely filed band open and fit this round hunkin piece of bezel into it neatly and not crooked. AND THEN we had to modify the bezel with V shaped cuts on the sides (which had to line up with the knife edge of the shank). From there we had to cut the seat for the stone, set the stone and then do what’s called a bright cut on it. And then polish it and pray to the god of your choice you don’t mess up the knife edge in the process.

Final product! (sorry if the image sucks)

The bench exam was a duplicate of a previous project “Xavier Xanadu” (the names make me giggle) which involved taking a pre-manufactured band, modifying it to accommodate 2 heads for 2mm stones, soldering those in, setting the stones, sizing it up (mine went up 2 ¼ sizes! Dang!) and setting a pearl. Which, again, involves a dab of 2 part epoxy. The only difference is we didn’t have to half shank the damn thing WITH a pearl attached (shoot me). Since we had already essentially done this project once, doing it again wasn’t such a big deal and actually went far smother than the initial ring. That was a one day exam which only four of us completed in one day (mine came screeching into the job box at exactly 3:01 p.m…. class ends at 3). The rest of the class had Friday to finish it up. All of us spent the remainder of Friday finishing up Wanda, which was SUPPOSED to be a three day project.

Monday we have the pleasure of starting a project that will in the end be a hinged charm. Hinges and I are not friends (much like chains and i) and I hoped that I would never see them again after receiving my BFA. However, the torture continues and I will certainly have some nightmare inducing stories next week.

The action words that spring to mind when I hear the word “hinges” are:

seize.

freeze.

melt.

crying.

Stay tuned.

The week has gone well for me. The projects are getting understandably more tedious and difficult not only in fabrication, but in time of completion too. I’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’m just elated to get the damn thing done, and don’t expect miracles in regards to how FAST I can do it. I’ve found pleasure in sneaking up on the fabrication of these pieces and found that taking and extra second or four to contemplate my next move is the key to completing them well and within the parameters of the project. There are still some speedboats in our class that whip through it only to discover mistakes “after the fact” and that they should have approached it a bit slower and with more caution.

What else is going on? Not much I say. I sort of feel like I’m in this perpetual look of work, school, sleep. I’m ok with that for now but I promise you I’m looking forward to getting into a normal work routine and maybe having a life again. Maybe more money would be nice although I don’t expect tons of it. Just more than I have now would be awesome. I’d like to exist on more than tuna , fruit and sandwiches some day. :) Until that day, cheers to happily evolving!

Until next week my friends,
Be well.