One sedative, please.

You know when you know you’re getting close to a big change? A move, school ending, new job, major life change of any sort… and all outward appearances point to calm and collected but inside you’re a raging sideshow circus?

Welcome.

And as much as I would love to write about all of the things swimming around in my head regarding what I’m feeling, I’ve decided to save some of that for my last school blog in a couple weeks! (and again, never fear my dear public reader, I will continue to write about my job hunting adventures, albeit maybe a little more sporadically)

This week officially ended our steady stream of graded projects. Our very last one was called Trudy’s Trillion. We were given 2 days to fabricate this pendant, bezel and set a trillion stone, for which they graduated us to a CZ! The fabrication of the actual pendant was standard issue construction for us at this point, but fabricating a bezel for a trillion was another story. A trillion is a three sided (think triangle, with bowed sides i kept refering to as "big hips") faceted stone. The tricky part of making the damn thing was getting three sides identical. Not one millimeter smaller or bigger. Exact. And once that was done, I cut into it and remove some of the side walls and leave three “V” prongs for the corners of the stone. And then file beveled edges on the side walls. And THEN I got to cut the seat and set the stone. As it turns out, my seat was a t-a-d off center, and it seemed that I may not be able to set it. Luckily, they have also taught us crazy modification skills, so stubborn Betsy plowed forward and a-modifying I did. I brought this bezel within and inch of its life, but I got that wide-hipped stone saran-wrapped into that bezel. Yes I did.

HOWEVER,

if you check this thing out under a loupe you may or may not discover the stone is mildly crooked and the v-prongs could use a bit more stone contact, but other that that, MEH! Its done. it’s the last one. I certainly got to a point where that’s all I kept saying in my head. And since it was the last one, Don told us we could do whatever we wanted to the finish. And since I may or may not have had very mild fire scale *gasp* near the bezel, a-texturing I went. Here’s some pictures of the front and back of the pendant.

The remainder of the week was spent on a two day bench exam. This is the one I mentioned that we got to pick the piece to make. I will start by saying this was the bench exam of all bench exams to date. Inside the bag were three patterns for us to choose from, one flat sheet of metal, one strip of metal, once piece of wire and TWO marquise stones, of which we were to bezel set and incorporate into the design. I initially was going to do this pair of earrings that swoop around and had the stones set near the bottom of them. At the last minute I decided that it was way too organic and curvy for me to want to polish it, so I detoured to a very geometric pendant. My reasoning was that straight lines are easier to clean up then curvy ones. No matter which one you chose, they all had their challenges. Had I stuck with the curvy earrings, I would have been blessed with trying to figure out how to fold and polish them without tearing them up. And there was minimal soldering for them. Instead I chose the queen of all things solder-able and began construction. For this particular pattern I had to cut out two pieces, one of which would be soldered onto the top of the other for a layered look. I also had to modify the design to accommodate two bezel set marquise, fabricate a bail, make the bezels for the stones, set the stones and then solder the whole thing together which turned out to be extremely labor intensive. By the end of Friday I had managed to get the piece within basic polish and was in the process of burnishing the insides when my burnisher slipped and make a nice fine scratch on the surface of my piece. So I got it 95% done.

I was a little irritated that I didn’t get it done, but I was relieved that over half the class wasn’t done either. Monday I will be finishing it up and turning it in. here’s a picture of the piece mid construction ( post-pickle, so it’s a bit on the dull side)

Monday next week they’re giving us metal and REAL stones for us to make a “creative” project, which we get to keep. I have no idea what to make or even the kind of stones I will choose, but its not graded and he’s not collecting it, so he said if we want to skip it and keep the goods, we can. Which I am. Free gift with minimal purchase of one class? I’ll take it. And if I have time, I will make something. Tuesday and Wednesday we get to practice free-forms AGAIN, and Thursday we will have the final bench exam attempt number one. No class on the 4th! Whoot! And they have decided that because it’s a holiday weekend, we wont find out if we passed the first round until the following Monday morning. So I will have to go in, and if I passed, I can leave and come back that Wednesday for the written, and if not, I get to stay and attempt again. Good times!

So we’re winding down. As of today (Sunday), I have 12 days until graduation! I have decided to keep my crappy job schedule in favor of spending my days writing my resume and researching jewelers I can mail said resume to. I have no idea how to write a resume and will be in contact with the schools resume assistant via email to get this thing put together. Ideally I’d like to take a couple weeks to relax and write and research, and then maybe once I’m sufficiently bored with free time again (which wont take long) I will start mailing this thing out. If anyone has tips on how to write a jeweler resume, or ANY resume for that matter, email me.

Please.

This weekend I’m going to the Del Mar Fair. I haven’t been to a fair in yeeeaarrrs, but I’m looking forward to crappy fried fair food and 4-H club pigs. And maybe a nerve wracking ride on a ferris wheel, which I am notoriously and ridiculously pansy about riding. I’ll spend the entire ride peeking over the edge while death gripping the seat and inspecting the bolts on the ride to ensure that they’re attached and focusing on how far away the ground is from my feet WHILE freaking out about how often it stops to let people on and off. So I may have to investigate a beer garden before my ride. Maybe I’ll bring my camera and shoot a picture of me having a nervous breakdown on the ride. Hilarity to come!Until next week, my friends, be well!

Pt 78 pronounced plat-nem, and the consequences of large torches.

I was driving Monday morning, feeling more or less exhausted (less exhausted with every slug of coffee), and at this intersection I pulled up behind a car that had the following messages adhered to its back windshield:
1) party naked.
2) pursue insanity
At that moment with the mild post-weekend fatigue and the cumulative stress of the past five months of school-work- sleep I truly laughed out loud . And I thought: Done and done.
This week was another one of those blurry ones I’ve been writing about for the last 4 weeks. For those of you with short attention spans : ring, ring and lasers, lasers, platinum, platinum and lasers, large torches, fireball, stab wound. For those of you interested in hearing about the whole story, read on.

Monday we revved up the week with the completion of that free form ring. The good news is Don figured out no one was on schedule and gave us the entire day to finish it, instead of the half day he had originally planned. Which set us back a half day on the schedule, but no one was angry about it. Here’s the great thing about being behind on the schedule: Don gets to decide if we skip a project to stay on track or to shove forward and freak us out. His decision was to skip a project. Wanna know what it was going to be? Anyone? Guesses?

Here are some choices, and you may only pick one answer.
1)chain repair
2)chain repair
OR
3)chain repair.
Anyway if I could hug the guy I would, but I’m sure it’d violate some rule or something. NO CHAIN REPAIRS! Whoot! *does tiny victory jig*

Tuesday (and Wednesday) we headed feet first into Harry and Shari’s Wedding ( the project names kill me). This project was probably my favorite lately. It consisted of an engagement ring with an emerald cut stone flanked on both sides by tapered baguettes, and a wedding band that hugs up on the engagement ring with 2 tapered baguettes as well. It was a really pretty set, honestly, and maybe its because I’m a fan of emerald cuts and baguettes. I just like the way they look. Not having ever set baguettes in my life, this took a second to figure out though. The first one’s the hardest for me because I’m so paranoid about doing it right that I forget I don’t know HOW to do it right. So I sit there with my burs and *ehnn-ehn-ehn-ehn* push the metal around, check with my loupe, push, check, swear, cut and MAYBE like a half hour later (seriously) I finally got one stone in. but here’s the thing: once I got that one in I knew exactly how to set the other three, so three went in about a half hour total. Again, seriously. And the emerald cut was easy to set, except the prongs on this puppy were thicker than my skull so it took a few minutes for me to chew through them. But here’s a picture of what it looks like 90% done (I have to finish it still)Thursday and Friday was what they like to call “The Platinum Experience”. Since platinum is more expensive then a kidney transplant, they only give us two days to play with it. Wednesday afternoon we had to break out some cleaning supplies and clean our benches out for the platinum work. We could have no gold or silver dust on the tops, in the trays, in our files, on our sandpaper sticks etc etc. so we spent a good 45 minutes cleaning. Reason being platinum’s high melting temperature. Gold and silver melt at a far lower temperature, thus, if you had all of this junk laying around, you could contaminate the platinum. Makes sense. Thursday morning we were greeted by larger torches, and their resident platinum tool kits and a job bag with platinum stock, head, a piece of gold wire and a stone. Basically an engagement ring with gold trim. Also, In our tool boxes were the safety glasses you HAVE to wear when working with platinum, and they are essentially what you would see on a welder, smaller scale. And any time you give overgrown children a new toy, you have to allot ten minutes for the excitement to wear off.

After we all came down from newtoybuzz, he started the most excruciating three part video series on platinum EVER, which was a buzz kill right off the bat. All I have to say about those videos is they were informative, but the narrator spoke so fast I felt like I was at an auction, so most of it went in one ear and our the other. And I fought my droopy eyes the entire time.

Post-video wake up consisted of Don lecturing us on eye safety (you can jack your retinas up if you don’t wear the goggles.) saying “No one wants to hire a blind jeweler, so wear the goggles people”. We were also shown how to adjust our larger flames for different platinum applications and how to weld and solder it (I had no idea you could weld it. But then again I have never done more that polish it before this week) with the torch, and how to laser weld (there’s a difference) it on the machine.
Me on the laser welder!!!

After numbing our brains, we were turned loose with instructions to “have fun” with it, because SURPRISE, its not a graded project. We were all immediately relieved and happy for the break, so the platinum experience was truly and experience. I loved working with it. I loved even more that the pressure to produce was lifted and we were allowed to have fun with it. I found it easier to set stones in it, it filed like butter and the clean up wasn’t as bad as I thought, just more steps. So I’m officially in love with the metal! Its just unfortunate that its so damn expensive and different to work with.

At some point on Tuesday my 16 year-old prodigy classmate and I were eyeballing our new torches for platinum and putting on appropriate tips for annealing the metal. And im in the process of digging out my torch sparker when I HEAR the gas on hers flowing next to me and then I hear “sparksparkspark” as she grinds her lighter a few times her torch to life…. And as I turn around slooooooowwwwwly to tell her to ease up on the gas, this fireball *KA-BLOOOFFFS* out of her torch and freaked both of us out sufficiently enough to sort of squeal in unison. Which made everyone laugh. But I FELT THE HEAT from that thing! So I teased her for the rest of the day about trying to burn me down. This is the same girl who lit my project book #9 on fire accidentally.

We have two weeks of class time left for this course. The third week is of course dedicated to the final written and bench exam. With July 4th being on a Friday this year and the campus closed, we’re (from what I understand) starting the final bench on Thursday the 3rd. I could be wrong, but that’s what I heard. Also, much of that previous week we’ll be getting to practice the exam so we can figure out how we want to do everything in ONE day. This week on Thursday we’ll have our 8th and final regular bench exam, which I saw a picture of. We get to pick on of three exams to do, but any way you go, there are two bezel set marquise stones. Refer to the heart pendant I did while back. But Monday we’re going to get to do lots of practice stone setting for the exam so we can refresh for it. I took Tuesday next week off to head in to night lab so I can get caught up and will probably be spending Tuesday evening rereading bezel set marquise information. From here on out it just seems like we’re being prepped for the ending. Which is cool. For all practical purposes, we’re done with projects, save for maybe one more. And since we’re the soon-to-graduate class, we have the showcase.

I hope you all are doing well, and I wish you the best of weeks. Start sending me some good vibes!
Until next week my friends, be well.

listing, lasers and project pile-ups

dork

Once again, this week was just a bit more hectic then the last, and finding a way to inhale what I’ve accomplished in a week and exhale it back out in breathable pieces for my grateful public sometimes becomes difficult. Especially at this point.

My brain is frying. My body is exhausted. But I couldn’t be more fulfilled if I tried.

Monday (if I remember correctly at this point) we were allowed to finish up that three-parter project, Mrs. French’s Gifts. After lunch we were introduced to channel set earrings, completely hand-fabricated channel set earrings, mind you, which didn’t look all to difficult, which is usually a sign that something is about to go horribly wrong because overconfidence will kill your work immediately. In that job bag were two strips of metal, one silver, one gold, a piece of silver wire for the posts, two pre-manufactured gold posts and some friction backs for the earrings. Oh, and four fake diamonds. Making the settings for the stones beckoned my precision filing skills, which were rusty. Which became evidently clear after I made the first setting, which listed to the left. Lesson here is if you do not file exactly straight and your file even so much as angles the wrong way for a fraction of a second, it changes the way the metal folds. Anyway, after my first failed attempt, I managed to get four heads to agree and be uniform in size and measurements. I soldered on the posts just fine and prepared to cut the seats. Now cutting seats for a channel set involves taking not-so-much metal out of the side walls of the earrings and snapping the stones into place. I just want to say that the seats I cut for these stones were unnecessarily huge on the first earring and consequently my stone danced around in the seats like soul train when I tried to hammer the walls down. I have also discovered that my reciprocating hammer (for the uninitiated, its essentially a tiny jewelry jackhammer) sucks ass and is worn out. So I borrowed Dons hammer and let me tell you, the soul train dance party ended. Those stones aren’t going anywhere unless I release them from the headlock I placed them in. Im still not done with the earrings WHY you ask? Because …

Wednesday afternoon (which is half a day before the 7th bench exam p.s.) Don launched us into YET ANOTHER fu**ing freeform remount project never mind that NO ONE was done with the earrings. None. So Wednesday we got to sit through another video and lecture on remounts while side-eyeing our still unfinished earrings. After the lecture he turned us loose to start the freeform, which no one checked out because we wanted to finish the earrings. Which I STILL did not get done by the end of class because I had some decent clean up to do on them.

SO

Thursday we had bench exam number 7, which was ANOTHER mothers ring. This ring wasn’t too bad because it was only four rounds, and the setting we were given for it was burnish finished, so the clean up on the ring was easy. We only had to size it up, clean up the ring and set four stones. We were given 4 ½ hours to complete it, and I finished mine in three hours and ten minutes. WHOOT! It was a really simple bench test and we were all pretty grateful for the break. Here’s a picture of the thing (in the bag because once its in the bag, its done)
Friday I went back and forth as to what I should be working on. Do I finish up these earrings or do I start in on the free-form? Being at 100% completion allows me at this point to decide if I want to even DO a project because I can afford to skip one if shit hit’s the fan. I discovered I could literally skip every project from here on out and still get out of here at the minimum 75% completion to graduate. But then I remember how much I spent to get here, and I forget that idea. But the options nice. So I set the earrings aside in favor of the free form, since its relatively similar to our final bench exam. I figured that I could use this time to get more acquainted with the freeform and get over my fears of remounts. So that’s what I did on Friday. I started the free form and by the end of the day I had two of the three heads soldered exactly where I wanted them. but its still not done and niether are the earrings....

The bad news is he’s only giving us the first part of the morning (up to break) on Monday to work on these and then heading into project 51! So I am prepared to call into my job on Tuesday to go to night lab if I feel like I may fall behind.

In other news we also started lasers this week. OMMMMGGUHHHHH they are the coolest things I have ever had the good fortune of touching. The laser welder can fix anything. I cant do much to describe then in detail because I’m still thumbing through the 3000 page handout on laser frequencies and trying to figure out all of the knobs and buttons. But damnit I think im in love. Its like a harmonious blend of art and science. And I can weld stuff together. So this week we’ve just been getting to play with it to see what it does, but the next three weeks it’ll be in the class and from what I understand we’re going to be using them for a few projects. I’ll keep you posted and try and get a picture of it in action for next week!

Oh friends. Its so hectic. Its stressful right now because the heat is on us, we’re the senior class and its just crazy the expectations of the instructors at this point. We have a few working weeks left and then finals. And somewhere in there we start platinum. Which im looking forward to. I don’t know. Its nuts. Totally nuts but I truly love it, and love what I do. So the journey my life has taken me on to figure this out has been worth it. Totally.

Until next week, my friends, be well.

Time management skillz: learned.

“Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.” ~Ambrose Bierce

I have found that over the course of ,oh, the last five months, that I have been completely loosing track of time. It occurs to me in revealing moments here and there that a normal calendar abiding person wouldn’t find as fascinating. I was reading my friends blog the other day, who’s busy in Israel doing some schooling of her own, and the first couple sentences of her blog went like this “We’ve sneaked into a new month and I barely noticed its passing. Israel has the wonderful ability to wave a magic wand of blissful ignorance to the changing of seasons. I’m beginning to find it…well… ignorantly blissful.” and as I read that I kind of felt like I just had an ah-HA! moment… the one where ,thanks to her blog, I was reminded that I have no seasons changes to guide my internal calendar like we do back home. Here, every day is pretty much predictable, and while nice, can really mess with you. Anyone with me? No real spring (okok, things go from green to green and flowery here) no real winter, no fall (okok, it goes from green and flowery to green) . Summer, well, summers here most days. Anyway, long story short, its way too easy to lose track of my days. not that i'm complaining.

This week was interesting. And by interesting I mean I’m having to sit here and sort through the blur and try and get everything in the right order so I can properly write about it. So I’ll break it down by day.

Monday: We were graciously given the day to finish up Lars, the enormous pearl necklace enhancer. I do have to say here that the stone for this thing was so large I could have probably set using my toes and a tree branch to hammer the prongs down. Speaking of prongs, they were the size of support beams in a warehouse. So cutting them and setting the stone was like, easy, and i didnt even need my optivisor! So grateful me finished up the double-wide pendant and tossed it in the job box. Also: We also got our class pictures which we spent most of the day laughing at it. We all look so professional, which, made us laugh more. Looks: deceiving. We sure do clean up well.

Tuesday: we launched right into Mrs. Whatsherface’s ring. This one was a 7 stone channel-set in yellow gold. All that was required of us was to hi-grade all 7 stones, clean the casting up and set the stones. I have to say that this one went exceptionally well for me and I nailed this ring before I left the building at 3 p.m. *throws up victory sign* total job time: 3 hours, 10 minutes and every single table on every stone lined up like a military formation. WHOOT!Wednesdaythursdayfriday: Some folks were still working on Mrs. Whatsherface’s ring in the morning so I got to fiddle around a bit and spent the morning sharpening my gravers, slapping new sanding paper on my sanding sticks and touring the room chatting with classmates. Which I’m good at. Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t be in the hospitality industry sometimes. What a nice break. The calm before the storm I like to call it. After break we were greeted with a dry erase board full of jewelry illustrations for our next project “Mrs. French’s Gifts”. PLURAL gifts. I thought this was a mistake and double checked the book. Sure enough. Gifts. Three. Here’s what I saw:This was a time management exercise for us. Three pieces of jewelry all requiring different things to complete them, three days to complete. The first piece was a simple heart shaped pendant, clean up the casting, set the stone, polish. Which an first sounded easy until I tried to cut seats for a heart shaped stone with awkward facets and an uneven girdle. So my first attempt at this was frustrating because my stone kept spinning to the left every time I pushed the prongs down. Which turned into a game of tweaking the prongs ever so subtly until I got it set straight. Which took forEVER. And it was so tiny I had to hold it with my fingers to do all of this which was a challenge unto itself. The second piece was an engagement style ring with a prong set marquise. At each end of the head was a v-shaped prong and two regular prongs on each side. The V-shapes don’t do much more then protect the points on the stone, so scooping out relief (deceptively easy sounding) for the points was easy. It was lining up the seats on the other four prongs and getting the stone level that was the challenge. And I thought I had this thing nailed until I went to do a final polish on it and realized that when I pushed the stone into the v-prongs I must have done it with more gusto then necessary and managed to crack the point on the stone. So I got to pull the broken stone and set a new one. And why did that happen? Well, too much gusto for sure, but also when I pulled the stone I looked at the broken point, and then at my relief hole through my loop to discover that I just hadn’t made that hole big enough, so the tiny hole plus the pressure shattered the point. So I re-drilled it deeper and reset a new stone. Glad it wasn’t real! And then we had to size it. Now the third piece was a hideous little number with a pear shaped stone, engulfed by 10 tiny channel set stones. Two of those stones were not only pink, but a hair smaller then the white stones. This was the pièce de résistance of the group. First, we had to clean it up, then size it up. Then we had to set all three thousand stones. Setting all of those tiny stones in the channel and doing it level and well was an event. I’m pretty sure some of my stones are sort of listing like a sinking ship, but since I decided that at that point that I was ok with that. Once we had all of the stones set, we got to size it down to a 6. Which, ok, not too big of a deal, but when sizing down a ring with this many stones in a channel, can prove to be a test of will and patience. So before I sized it down I made sure I tightened the stones really well. And that size down went beautifully. I only had three moderately loose stones. One of my classmates watched in horror as five of her ten stones clinked out after sizing. See, when you size a ring down, you change its structure, and it affects the seats of the stones. So too much too fast stretches it out and those stones fly like out of there like its on fire. By the end of the day on Friday I had two of the three pieces done, and was re-tightening the stones on the big-ugly. We’ll have half a day to complete these pieces on Monday!

All in all I’d say its going really well. I’ve said before that this guy grades really hard, and I welcome the criticism. I have gotten a couple projects back with C’s instead of CS’s because of little things wrong with them, but I’ve had great dialogue with Don about where I can improve some things and don’t particularly mind the grades, so long as I learn from it.

Its down to the wire here and while we’re all looking forward to moving on and getting out of here, we know that the next four weeks will be some of the hardest we’ll face. In the next four weeks we still have to complete two more JMA bench exams, 8 more projects and then tackle a final bench and written exam. Its a lot to think about and try not to stress out about. But that’s why I’m here!

Bring it on, I say.

Until next week, be well.

remounted remounted remounts and nightmares

No. I did not meet any celebrities this week.

No update on the hideous Aztec Spaceship pendant either. Sorry.

No picture either because it hasn’t been graded or returned.

The good news is I snapped a few shots of the freeform migraine that I had to work on for the bench test. Story to follow!

This week was the longest short week ever. We had Monday off due to Memorial Day, so my school week was only four days. Which was nice, but we packed so much into those four days that we could have used that extra day. They do this every time we have a day off. Whoever writes the syllabus for school forgets to consult any calendar and never accounts for holidays so when we have one, they have to cram an extra day of stuff into the short week to keep us on track.
As long as I had that extra day off, I decided to head to downtown San Diego with my roommate and take a tour of the USS Midway (PRIDE of the Pacific!). The aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1945 and decommissioned in 1991 and has since been turned into a museum and is anchored in the harbor. Now, I spent four years in the Navy and worked small crafts the entire time. I never had the experience of being stationed on an actual ship, a part of my service I am completely okay with. So being able to take a tour and “see what I missed” was really cool. Let me tell you something…I was a Boatswains Mate and did my fair share of dirty work, but when I made it into the space on the ship where the BM’s dealt with the anchor chains of this massive ship and saw that the links were the size of tires, I silently thanked every high deity that I never had to mess with anything that size. I also have not stepped foot on non-skid (it’s a non slip surface that’s slapped on the decks of ships to help keep your footing) in roughly 9 years so walking on the ships stairs and decks coated in this stuff caused unnecessary flashbacks. I was also grateful that I never had to lay down nonskid on a flight deck that’s three football fields long. Amen. But what really killed me was touring around the main deck just below the flight deck and noticing where the lifejackets were located. And then I remembered that not much in the military makes sense. And it made me laugh.

So here’s my roommate trying to reach them.

I could write an entire blog on my experience on that ship, but I wont. So in lieu of that, here’s a picture of me on the flight deck!

Back to business. So Tuesday we jumped right into KiKi’s Mothers ring. It was a five stoner. We were given a day and a half to set five ovals in a mothers ring, then size it up then retip three prongs. I didn’t think that this ring was going to be too hard at first, but we’re talking about 20 total prongs in very close proximity to each other, and the settings for the ovals were a bit different. It was pretty difficult to get the seats cut the same and set the stones because of this. I got four of the five set well, and the fifth, which was the “peridot”, made that thunderous “clicksnap” sound as I brought the (tight) prong down. which indicated to me that one of three things happened:

1) one of my knuckles popped

2) someone snapped their fingers

3) my stone cracked.

You pick.

So mid-Wednesday when absolutely none of us were done with KiKi, we shoved forward to Lars Larson, which is an “enhancer” for say, a large pearl necklace. SO we sat through the lecture and demo for that one, and the second he got done we all chucked Lars aside in favor of finishing Kiki WHY? Because our 6th Bench exam is the next day and it’s a one day exam and no one wanted to be behind in the event that the exam rolled over in to Friday.

Kiki: done.

Thursday we had the 6th bench and were greeted at the door by a mischievously smiling Don who simple wished us well and set out the job box. Inside those exam bags we found that damn freeform remount, three new heads and three new stones. The instructions for the exam were fairly similar to the original project we did with this ring, the only difference was that we had to take this down to a 5 from 7 ¼ on a ring that was previously half-shanked. So we had to make a cut on the side of the ring on one of the solder seams and size it there. We also had to pull the three existing stones and heads out and replace then with the new ones. Getting the heads and stones out was no problem. Three seconds. But the clean up I had to do prior to soldering the new heads in was an event that took me most of the morning. My idea was to get the ring back to its original look and THEN get everything soldered in to avoid lots of cleanup. Which, while labor intensive and made me feel like I was dragging behind everyone, turned out to be the best move I could have made. While everyone was slamming the new heads in on top of old solder and whatnot, I sanded and polished. So while they were trying to get tool marks out of hard to reach areas AFTER the soldered their heads in, I was doing nothing more than using some tripoli to clean up. Yay! So I avoided disaster to some degree. Around 2 p.m. I started sweating bullets because we only had one hour left and I was still cutting prongs. So was my 16 year old prodigy classmate, who was the one that kindly pointed the clock out to me. So we both shot each other that look you give someone in panic, turned up the volume on our respective MP3’s and proceeded to haul ass. In one hour I managed to get all of the seats cut, and stones set. Awesome. However, I did not get the prongs styled or a final polish. And I though I was going to get a finger wagging from Don for not finishing until I saw that exactly one person finished the exam in one day. The other 14 of us were allowed to complete the exam on Friday morning. I’m proud to announce that I only needed an extra half hour on Friday to style and do a final polish. Which made me the 3rd person done with the exam. Which I’m fine with.

Friday after I got done with my exam I started in on the fabrication of the Lars pendant. I was in the process of soldering assorted microscopic parts together when I heard the very loud “PANG-CLANG-Clunk” of someone’s project getting ripped from their hands and thrown mercilessly into the back of the rouge machine. Which I have stated before is one of the most sickening sounds you could ever hear. What this does to the entire class is causes us to stop what we’re doing and look up in horror and wait with mild panic to see if whoever is polishing is going to start crying or give us the thumbs up that their project survived. Much to my sadness I looked up to see my 16 year old friend at the machine doing a final rouge before turning in her bench exam.

Here’s what I saw in one minute flat:
1) turns off machine.
2)picks up ring tentatively
3) reviews potential damage
4) places ring off to the side
5) stabilizes herself with both hands
6) dips head in defeat
7) takes deep inhale/exhale
8) picks up ring
9) turns around slowly
10) looks directly at me and with the biggest blink-blink baby deer eyes I’ve ever seen shakes her head side to side and hold up the ring. I think her lip quivered. Or maybe that was me because I had that sick feeling in my stomach?
11) brings the ring to ME! Drops it on my desk to look at and leaves the room to walk it off.

Here’s the wreckage:

Luckily, only the shank was mutilated. The stones survived and Don felt so bad for her that he straightened her shank out the best he could for her while she was out walking off steam. Unfortunately the shank cracked at one of the seams so she had to resolder it back together and try to clean it up. I felt so horrible for her. But she got it done. And that’s what matters. But it’s one of those things that reminds you that nothing is “done” until its in the bag and back in the job box.

But I did get a picture of mine right before I turned it in. For your viewing pleasure, I give you Gigi’s freeform remounted remount headache inducing bench exam #6: So none of us are done with Lars obviously, but that’s not stopping Don from launching into another project on Monday. Game on! Intensity: check. Sanity: check.

In other news I am the proud mother of a brand spanking new Bodum double walled borosilicate glass French press. I’ve always wanted one, but decided that the one I wanted was too expensive. So when the opportunity to get the one I wanted at a ridiculous ridiculous discount at my job came up, I ran with it. All I’m going to say is I got a $100 press for about $24. And I love love love it. Thanks for sharing this moment with me.

Until next week my friends, be well.