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!