Solder of Love

I'm a lackluster blogger.

2008-08-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

GAH!!

Sorry its been so long since I blogged my loyal friends and fans!

So much has been going on. I have a difficult time trying to figure out where to start! I guess I can start by telling you all that I have no greater joy in my life then my recently liberated free time. I’ve been camping twice at the Indian reservation, I’ve been to the bars, hanging out with friends and sleeping in. Its been a great break for me!

HOWEVER

For the last couple weeks my roommate and I have been apartment hunting closer to downtown San Diego with mixed results. We find places we like but they’re out of our price range, we find places in our price range but not what we’re looking for. The good news is that we have found a couple places that we can live with (which is key here) within our budget and in great locations. We’ve applied at one and are making more appointments for this next Monday to see some others.
Meanwhile I’d been going back and forth with the resume guru at school tweaking and re-tweaking my resume. We finally agreed on a final draft and I’m proud to announce that I FINALLY have a complete resume suitable for shipping and handing out.

whoot!

SO on top of :

resume tweaking,

free time

and apartment hunting,

I’ve been compiling lists of jewelers I’d like to work for and reading the “about us” sections on their websites trying to get a feel for the shop before I decide to walk in and hand them my resume. I’d like to be comfortable with the idea of the shop (or my perception of) before I hand my resume to the worlds most uppity store in SD.

Needless, the last few weeks have been crazy. I haven’t sat down to relax or spend even a half a day being lazy since graduation. I’ve been moving moving moving!

On top of all of this I’ve been working more hours at my Crate job and I’m happy to announce that I have so many hours THERE that I was able to make this past Wednesday my last day at the worlds worst part time job (rhymes with Nichaels) . I loved the people I worked with there, and have a deep respect for folks who do this kind of work for survival. I will never ever be horrible to a retail employee ever again in my life. Or waitresses. Because they handle the stuff you eat.

Aaaaaaaaand on top of all of THAT I had a friend in town from back home last weekend, so I spent four or five days entertaining her and hanging out (I miss you Nicole!!!!) and it was a really good feeling to see familiar faces. Its only when I see people I love and miss, that I start missing home. Most days I’m fine and focused and love where I’m at… but seeing a good friend or a family member tends to change your mind, at least temporarily (sorry guys, not coming home any time soon. But I miss you all!!)

So as you can see I’ve been quite busy. We have 2 ½ weeks to find a place, move, and get settled. There’s a career fair at my school mid September which I’m bent on attending and handing out my resume. And somewhere in there I’m trying to find the time to head to some of these shops in person.

Help.

Also: I’ve been fixated when possible on the Olympic swimming. I’m certain that Dara Torres is the reason I’m saying this (she’s the 41 year old mother of two in her 5th Olympics and the oldest woman to swim! And in the most amaaaaazing shape of her life) but I’m considering doing a team triathlon with my roommate. I would swim, she would bike and we need a volunteer for the run (Jami, you in?) . I think I operate best with goals. So there’s one. Plus I have a dear friend (Jami!!) in Israel right now training to run the Nike Human Race on August 31st!! YAY!!! ( you can find information here:

http://nikeplus.nike.com/nikeplus/humanrace/index.jsp ) and it also admittedly has me inspired to do cool shit. But right now its an idea, and certainly is last on my list of things to focus on. But I’ll keep you all posted!

YAY DARA TORRES!! if i look like this any time between now and 41 i'll be happy

SO that’s what ive been up to. I’m sorry again that I’ve been so long! I promise to keep you all updated more frequently even if its boring and short.

Until next time my friends, be well.

Random abrasions are a side affect of being bored with writing your resume

2008-07-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

I have to say that some days I really find free time too much and crave the structure once provided me by school and work, but then I think about all of the cool stuff I’ve gotten to do and I find myself enjoying it more then I admit. Albeit enjoying on a very thin budget, but im no stranger to heisting my way through my day on a low income.

After my tubing-down-the-river-adventure (of which I am already plotting my next trip to) I spent the next three days marveling at the amount of bruises I collected on my trip, along with mystery scrapes, abrasions and a sore rear-end from sleeping on the ground. While at the beach yesterday morning with my roommate, I decided to take a picture of my leg to sort of illustrate my injuries for you. In lieu of the hand injury tally report you’ve all become SO fond of, I give you the brand new

Random Injury(s) of the Week

SO last week I was incredibly motivated to write my resume. I sat down with my notebook, my pen, my stacks of information from career services and a guide on “how to write a winning resume”. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, snacks in my left and I started….I got just about all of the basic information down, and I got to that point with the resume that I had to start writing out my “objectives” and things like that. Now, my objective, as with anyone else writing a half assed resume, is to get a job.

If I had my way my objective would say this:

“To find a half way decent job in a good location that I don’t have to commute more than 15 minutes to because commuting and I don’t get along. I would prefer that I get paid somewhere hovering above poverty level and with benefits to include vision. I would also prefer that my coworkers not be too chichi because I’ll probably not get along with them and talk smack. Casual attire preferred, bonus if I can show up in my pajamas.”

What my objective (thus far) REALLY says is this:

“to obtain and entry-level bench jeweler position working with sterling silver, karat gold and platinum”

Really. I don’t know how to sell myself like this on paper. I feel cheap presenting my objective in such a blehhhhhh blehbleh manner. It doesn’t FEEL me. I don’t feel it. It feels generic and uninteresting. So again, if anyone has advice, email me. Because I have no idea what to say. Bigkinz@hotmail.com

And yes this is the first time in my life I’ve written a resume.

So after that objectives debacle, I plunked away at the rest until I at least had something I could email to the career services lady for review. So I did that, I got it emailed and you know what, she emailed me back with like two generic questions about my “resume” (I use that term lightly right now) and suggested that I email it back to her after I “revise” it. *blank stare* I suppose I was under the impression that they were going to help me out more then this.

Let me be honest: I’m looking, I think, for someone else to write this thing.

So I’ve been dragging my feet in regards to putting this thing together, but being broke is a great motivator, so I’ll be working on it more today.

Moving on, I spent the rest of the week just relaxing, and working my crappy part time jobs. Which was nice. But I still find myself popping out of bed relatively early sans alarm and occasionally freaking out because I think I m late for school. I’m working through that.
This past weekend I went to the San Diego Pride Parade. I headed out Friday after work and went to my one of my friends place where I promptly had a drink or three and played Cranium until 2:30 in the morning on their porch. We wound up post-game at a taco shack where I spent 15 minutes in a half drunken state marveling at the size of my chicken taco, which had like, the entire chicken stuffed into it. Delicious. I spent Friday night at a friends and woke up thirteen times I swear. Saturday, fueled on three cups of coffee and two cumulative hours of sleep, we headed out to the salon where my friend works AND just so happens to have salon parking AND is a block and a half from the parade route… so I got to park my truck with no problems. In the bed of the truck we thrifty parade goers had a cooler full of beer complete with solo cups (no containers at the parade). We proceeded to pop a few open, and head out to meet up with other friends. We spent the majority of the day walking around the parade and ducking into liquor stores for refills if we were too far from the truck (FYI the stores here will give you a cup to dump your drink in, complementary!). Mid afternoon and post-parade we all found ourselves guests at a VIP hair salon party complete with food and free drinks courtesy of my hair stylist and friend who’s got the hook up. Since it was a hair salon party, there just happened to be like, 300 amazing hairstyles walking around too. It was a pretty party. I spent the remainder of the evening relaxing with my friend over at one of my friends houses watching the sun set from their porch and BBQ’ing. SUNDAY, I made it to the festival and got a chance to walk around and see booths. My roommate spent a productive weekend volunteering for a women’s health tent so we spent some time hanging out with her until I convinced her to take a break and head to the beer tent with us. Where I promptly received 5 free beer tickets from a dude looking to leave. HOORAY!

That’s 5 free beers people.

In any event, we spent the rest of the day there on the grass talking with everyone, enjoying music and cold beer and the atmosphere. When I went to leave the festival, my friend and I discovered that neither one of us were suitable for driving, so we left the festival, headed out into the park and sat on a blanket where we both eventually ended up napping. THREE AND A HALF HOURS LATER I woke up (it was 9:20 p.m.) to a dark sky and an abandoned park…. After laughing about it for 15 minutes, we both got up refreshed and headed to our respective homes.

me and some of my friends at the hair salon party

Monday I spent in recovery grilling out with my roommate, drinking water.

Which leads me to today, where I have decide to get busy and get some things done (finally). I’m enjoying the liberties associated with down time, and I’m feeling good about where I’m potentially heading! Carry on!

Until next time my friends, be well.

Adieu, pre-programed monday through friday alarm!

2008-07-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

the cumulative description of the last six months is not eluding me, i'm just havng a great time trying to condense all of these emotions for you. I find it close to impossible to describe what this last week has been like for me, but I assume at this point if you’ve kept up with the blogs, you understand how emotional and out-of-control this has been for me.

bench clean out day :(

This tool box weighed like, a brillion pounds when i got done packing it.

When I started this program I set out to accomplish something for myself. I wanted to raise my personal bar of expectation and push myself to limits I only hear about people reaching. The goals I had for what I wanted to accomplish were not only met here, but surpassed. I found something here in me these last 6 months that I knew existed, but had lost touch with and I suppose it was only a matter of time before the love affair I had with metal was reignited.

I spent the last 6 months with one of the funniest, greatest group of classmates I could have asked for. The team dynamic in that room was outstanding. In and out of the classroom I met and became friends with people from Canada, Ohio, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Arkansas, Florida, California, Alabama, North Carolina, India, London, North Korea, China and Japan. My oldest classmate was 53 in for a life change, the youngest and one of my favorites, 16, and beyond gifted at such a young age. I had the pleasure of working side by side with so many talented and gifted people it makes my head spin sometimes. I learned something from everyone. Even irrelevant things like who Lil Wayne is or why people from the south start conversations with “bless her heart, but…”

Many people came here because their family is in the trade. Some came because they had to. Some came because they want to. But the ones that stand out in my mind are the ones that were as in love with what they do as I am. In the end we were all here to be better at what we did, learn, absorb and hopefully move forward in the trade as successfully as possible.

I worked a lot. I carried two part time jobs and went to school full time. I worked with one day off a week, knowing that it wasn’t forever, it was just for now. I lost weight (thanks tuna and ramen diet!), lost my mind a few times too, but I never lost my determination or my desire to be here. I would have never done this alone, so thank you all who emailed, called, commented, mailed me stuff and wished me well. Knowing there were people out there interested in what I was doing kept me going on these blogs too.

some of the amazing ladies and i at graduation!!! About the last week.

I posted some stuff. Blips if you will. But I passed everything just fine!! My family arrived on Thursday muuuuch earlier then I expected and we spent some time hanging out and catching up (via bottles of win of course). Friday was graduation. My mom and step dad were there, as were everyone else’s families. I got to meet a lot of my classmates family members which was neat. I always like trying to figure out who looks like who more when I meet peoples parents. The ceremony itself was two hours long. We had one GJ class (mine), one Graduate Gemologist (GG) class and one Applied Jewelry Arts class (AJA). Total was about 40-50 students. And the reason it took two hours is because they called us up one by one! Really. So everyone was presented with their diploma and shook all kinds of hands, and then had to SAY something at the podium.

I will say right now that I :

1) had no idea we were going to have to say something

2) am really bad at public speaking. So I couldn’t tell you what the hell I said because I saw a microphone and some words came out. It was like “i, uhhh, would like tehheplehhh aaguhhhbluhhh habababalahhhh thank you”. but my mom reassured me that it was eloquent and to the point. (which makes me suspicious since mothers are supposed to protect their young…)

After graduation we did a family dinner at a local brewery where I ordered some shrimp something or other and my beer sampler. Delicious. Yay me! And I was proud of my mom for expanding her palate a bit and skipping the hamburger in favor of a butterflied chicken breast cooked in a lemon garlic beer (brewery. Hello) saucy something or other with artichokes and capers! Yeah mom! Although I did eat most of the artichokes.

Saturday I drove the ‘rents around San Diego after breakfast which took up most of the day. We went through a bunch of small towns and then up over the bridge to Coronado and then back. Saturday night we all went out to dinner. And by we all I mean me, roomie, friend, mom and step dad. Then we came home and played apples to apples. Best game ever. aside from cranium. and pictionary, which i rock by the way.

Sunday afternoon my mom and step dad left in the early afternoon. After they left I went to one of the Indian reservations with a couple friends and went tubing down rivers and drank beer. And I think we ate somewhere in there. But mostly it was beer and river. I managed to smack my foot on some rocks, and gather about 20 bruises, but it was a blast! And it was peaceful. 24 plus hours with no cell phone, no music, no gadgets. Just the river, some beer and some friends. Perfect!!

I’m already finding that free time is over rated and I’m currently looking forward to going to work, which hasn’t happened in months, if ever. I’m already bored. But The good news is it will propel me into resume writing action quicker then I imagined it would. I just bought a brand new notebook (which always comes equipped with optimism for what you might fill it with) specifically for the task.

On to bigger things my friends! I will still be writing here, posting updates and whatnot, so check back when you can. I may not just publish on Sundays, but in a rather sporadic pattern and at will.

Thank you all again. And until next time my friends, Be well.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaand im done

2008-07-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

Two friends of mine came over for our first and last study group last night. Knowing these two guys, i knew studying would be not only streamlined and shortened to the necessary information, but it would also involve beer and something delivered for dinner.

My hunch was correct as they strolled in, dropped beer on the table and one of them began talking about how he hadn't eaten all day. We got down to business AFTER i gave them a tour of my apartment, showed them some prior projects i'd done in college and we had sufficient time to bullshit.

fourteen books, one each, and we quizzed each other back and forth. The actual studying lasted approxamately 45 minutes, and then we ordered pizza. and then we played some Guitar Hero, drank more beer, ate pizza, played Guitar Hero, watched a special on KPBS about the Bog people being exhumed and studied, ate more pizza, beer, beer, and garlic knots.

4 1/2 hours of thier company and we studied for 45 minutes.

anyway, we were fine. I escaped with a 95%, and the guys got 95% and 96%.

I am officially a GJ!!

now i just have to pund through family weekend and graduation and i'll be soooooo done.

my next blog will most likely be posted late, as in a day or two late, as my family will be here and i have some entertaining to do.

Thank you all so much for your kind words, best wishes, love and support. You all certainly made this easier for me, and i'm glad to be able to share with you my experiences.

i love you all.
Until next blog my friends, be well.

Final bench update!!

2008-07-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

HEY EVERYONE! I'm happy to announce that i passed my final bench exam on the first submit today! whoot! whoot! whoot! as of lunch time today there was just myself and one other classmate that submitted (and both of us passed!). I submitted at 11:30 this morning. I spent the next 15 minutes trying not to throw up or let my heart drop out of my chest, i said some hail mary's and rubbed all the good luck charms on me (you bet i had them). At 11:43 Don came back in with my grade sheet, smiled at me, shook my hand and asked me what my plans were for the rest of the day because i was DONE!!!

All i have left now is to sleep in tomorrow (teehee) and study for my written exam on wednesday! oh and shop for a graduation get-up!

a picture of my grading sheet!

A final update on wednesday my friends! be well!

sanity check cleared! whoot!

2008-07-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

My second to last week. Unreal.

and no, i did not ride the ferris wheel last week for all who may be interested......

Since things were sort of grinding to a halt as far as projects were concerned, the week started out fairly uneventful WHILE building pressure in regards to the bench final. Monday we were given some “free” metal and allowed to root through some REAL stones (topaz, garnet, citrine, opal etc) and pick up to 7 stones (depending on size) to do a “creative” project. In other words, we’ve run out of things for you to do so find something TO do sort of thing. Since I already had a ton of my own silver already in ingot form and some rolled down, I opted to keep the bag of silver shot they gave me for some future endeavor. I thought about making it into an ingot and rolling it out anyway, but this way I have the option later on down the road to cast it if I feel so inclined.

Meh.

Long story short I just took the free stuff and squirreled it away in favor of practicing the ever loved freeform. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning were spent practicing.
that’s all I did.

It went like this for two and a half days:
-Heat up ring (previous freeform from week whatever)
-Remove heads.
-Clean up.
-Solder in new heads.
-Heat ring up
-Remove heads
-Clean up
-Solder in new heads.
-Repeat
-Repeat
-Repeat

Wednesday after lunch we started tool prep for the final bench exam on Thursday. I spent two hours cleaning my files, re-doing my sandpaper sticks, installing new pumice wheels in multiples, cleaning up my pliers, refreshing my firecoat and flux, cleaning tweezers, and rearranging my bench so that only the tools I knew I would need would be exactly up front. I certainly didn’t want to be rooting through there looking for something when time is not on my side, you know? But you guys should have seen it. It was like we were prepping for battle or surgery by the way we took care to clean and line our tools up juuuuuuust so. It made me giggle a bit. About a half hour before the end of class, Don jumped in and we spent some time reviewing all 18 quizzes in prep for the final written exam this next Wednesday. This was the last time that we would have a regular class! So it had to be done a week early.

Final bench exam, attempt #1.….

Thursday we were allowed into the class 15 minutes early to start lining up things and setting up our benches. At 8 a.m. the head GJ honcho came in and told us the requirements of the exam and what specifically he’ll be looking for when he grades these. He spoke for about 5 minutes and congratulated us on meeting all of the academic requirements to be allowed to take the final exam. When he was done, Don stepped in and read the criteria for the actual exam, pointed out that this was a ONE day exam and briefly went over what Honcho had just said, and then he reminded us that he under no circumstances could answer any questions we have until AFTER we submit for grading. The minimum requirements that needed to be met by the end of the day were to have the ring sized, polished to a tripoli finish, four heads soldered in to the ring tastefully and in harmony with the structure of the ring, and the stones tacked into place. That was the minimum. And then he wished us the best of luck and put out the job box!

Our free form final bench exam bag consisted of one freeform ring, four stones (one oval, three RBC’s) , four heads and a chunk of sizing stock. I started by filing off the casting sprue, and sizing it up. I don’t normally have issues with sizing up, but I’ll tell you what… I was nervous. And when I get nervous, my brain farts and I cant think. Once I got myself calmed down to where I wasn’t shaking the solder off my pick, I got it sized and began clean up on it. By morning break I had all of that done and my goal was to have the heads soldered in by lunch. When we come back from break we only have an hour and 15 minutes until lunch, so that’s roughly an hour to get the four heads in place and accurate. Now if you have ever tried to slam heads into a ring, it doesn’t happen. You cant rush it. Not at least at my level. Every move is calculated, every piece of solder is places juuuuuuust so, and if the head is soldered in even the tiniest bit off, the whole ring looks stupid and you have to pull it and redo it. Well I got the oval head in (which was the biggest) just fine, and worked my way down to the smallest (which would be the first to melt you know). I wasn’t running into TOO many problems until I got to the last small head. Now, the requirements for this ring also include minimum contact for the heads on the ring. For example, a round head has to have 25% minimum contact with the ring OR 2 points of contact. Which wasn’t a problem until the last head. I got what I would say is 15% contact. So I obviously needed to get another point soldered in there. The problem was that the location of where I could add more solder was inside, underneath and around the fucking bend right near where the oval and the medium round head sort of met. Now, in order to get solder to flow you have to heat some stuff up. But you don’t want to melt things either. So getting what you want out of the ring involves some critical thinking and creative problem solving. So how DO you solder here here and here without melting the other heads?

Heat sinks. ridiculous ammounts of heat sinks........

Tweezers act as heat sinks and will draw heat away from whatever you’ve clamped them on to. So I dug around and brought out the arsenal of tweezers and clamped everything and their mother with these things. And about 10 minutes before lunch I had all four heads on! Wahlah!
Here’s a picture of what I mean.

By about 2:30 I had all of my seats cut and my stones tacked in, and decided that I would in fact NOT look a gift horse in the mouth and push through finishing in a half hour, but instead opted to get approval for meeting the minimum requirements, which were met, and I will be allowed to finish the final touches on Monday morning and submit for grading. So while I have MET some criteria, I will not know if I passed or not until I submit on Monday. I’ll try and post a tiny bonus blog Monday for you all!

My friend Domo Arigato Heather Roboto and I were so psyched that we all (WE ALL!!!) met the requirements that we did a happy robot chair dance. i have a video of it, but since i'm technology impaired, it's not going up. i tried. sorry.

Not one person in my class submitted for grading Thursday. We will all be back on Monday to tweak up some things and hold our breath while they grade. Wednesday we have our written exam and Friday, my friends, I graduate. My mom and step-dad will be here on Thursday and I’ll be super happy to see some family out here. They will be in town through Sunday so I may not get a blog up for you all until that following Monday. We’ll see. But there will be one!

Onward to my very last week my friends! This trip sure has been exhilarating, huh?
Until next week my friends, be well.

One sedative, please.

2008-06-29T07:45:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-06-21T09:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-06-08T09:06:00.000-07:00

“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

2008-06-01T10:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Teenage awkwardness: over.

2008-05-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

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....

2008-05-05T22:56:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

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.

I'll be in tri-focals soon enough.

2008-04-27T09:32:00.000-07:00

“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.“ -Oscar Wilde

They say that when you practice something over and over, say a movement or a physical action, you develop what is referred to as “muscle memory”. which basically means you’ve done the same movement enough times that your body goes on auto pilot and your (in my case) hands just know what to do.

I’ll explain.

I find it amusing that I tend to look at things like jewelry, crafts, clothing, furniture, anything, etc and scoff at its craftsmanship or design and say “I can MAKE that, I’m not BUYING it”. I think anyone wit any creative streak IN them has at some point done this once, if not more frequently then we admit. And when you DO get the opportunity to make it yourself, you discover that not only is it more time consuming and expensive to do it your way, but it would have been cheaper and less stressful to just buy it. We never really analyze what goes into making something complex until our arrogance sits us down with the process involved and makes us give it a shot.

Monday found me face to face with a yellow gold circle pendant with 24 tiny gaping holes waiting for a tiny bur to make tiny seats for the tiny stones. This is one of those moments that I realized I’d taken for granted the skill and patience that goes into a project like this. Now, it seems like this would be cut and dry. Bur some seats, drop in some stones, tweak some prongs, wah-lah. Done.

Nope.

Here one of the requirements was to line up all 24 stones (2mm) and high-grade them and sort them out before setting them. Which means: I had to line up my stones according to the girdle thickness, table height, pavilion shape etc. And I had to do this looking through a 10x loupe. You can imagine how cross-eyed we all were. That took the better part of an hour just to do that. And you HAVE to do that because part of your grade involves setting them in order. I could write a small book on why they make us do it this way but I wont. Just trust me. After that was over, I got to bur a seat, set a stone, bur a seat, set a stone, repeat. And each time you do this you have to make sure that every stones table is even with the last stone. And if its not, then you tweak until it is. When I finally got all 24 stones set I had to show it to Doug. Once I got the grunt of approval I got to go back to my bench and cut off one inside and one outside prong to simulate damage/wear and do some repronging. I’m proud to announce that I didn’t melt anything and my repair job was awesome. And one of the prongs was a bit chunky, but you wouldn’t notice it unless I pointed it out to you with a loupe.

Repronging!

Tuesday through Thursday found us making earrings. Two pairs. More setting practice but this time with different stones. No spinells this week. The first pair of earrings were kind of cool. The first pair we did we a pair of radiant cut Moissanites which are similar in look to diamonds. The only thing that sucked was that they abrade pretty easily, so you had to be careful with your files when you shaped the prongs. We were given the heads for them so it was nice to not have to MAKE it, but setting them was a bit different since the cuts on the stones were sort of odd. I think they went out of their way to give us the stones that were cut by the half-blind stone cutter. Doug said to get used to it. So we did. Sometimes you just have to roll with the dice you’re given, right? The second pair were completely hand fabricated settings for a pair of round green marcasites. They looked like how you imagine pearl earrings looking, except with these hideous green balls glued onto them. Every single stone I got was drilled by the same blind guy who cut our Moissanites, so I had to make some adjustments to the stone and my setting of it. I managed at some point to split an entire ball in half trying to jam it onto my ill-filed post, so I got a new one which was delightfully drilled correctly. I then gleefully hammered the carcass of the split stone into dust. Jeweler therapy I call it.

Friday found me completely caught up with all of my projects and with nothing to do. SO I checked out a supplemental project. Yes, that’s right, and extra project. I don’t get any credit for it, but it gives me an opportunity to try stuff I haven’t without fear of losing a grade. Which is cool. So I checked out a pendant project which is involving me making a very precision setting for a channel set emerald cut. Which looked easier then it was. I spend all of Friday filing and fitting, filing and fitting. And by the end of the day I had the home for the stone soldered together. This is a piece in progress, so I haven’t set the stone, and that will have to wait until I have another down day. Maybe by then I will have learned how to channel set!

Four flush set stones!

There was a bit of sadness this week in my class. We had our first academic drop, and it was one of my “gang” unfortunately. I cant really go into detail, since all of the details were sort of personal for her, but my friend got dropped due to unsatisfactory performance. Luckily though this school has made some accommodations and is letting her roll back to the class behind us (which is in week 8 or 9 now) without penalty but she has to wait until they get to week 14. Anyway, it was sad this whole week not having her here and stranger to see her bench empty. But we’re happy that they’re cutting her some slack. The positive side of that is it was a wake up call for those still behind as they all figured out that the schools academic requirements aren’t really a suggestion, but actual requirements. So everyone’s been on time and in class this week which is impressive.

Other than that, its just the same old same old. Work, school, sleep. But I did manage to score a couple days off this week so it was an above average relaxing week for me. I did escape the apartment last night to meet up with one of my brothers friends who’s out here temporarily doing his Marine Corps thing and we had a couple drinks and hung out. It was really nice to see a familiar face around here. Its always interesting to hang out with a gang of rowdy military guys, toss in some beer and *wah-lah* you have an amusing evening. And oddly enough I always feel safe with these types of guys because it feels like you’re surrounded by a bunch of brothers. Which is cool.

Bench Exam #4

On to week 16!! Ten weeks of madness left everyone!

Until next week, be well.

pearl toast and afros

2008-04-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

When I was at NIU working on my BFA, I treated myself to a couple ceramics classes. In 2002 in advanced ceramics I made a pig shaped planter which ,conceptually, is pretty funny. I modeled it after some of my cartoon renderings of pigs. And it turned out hilariously beautiful. Thing is, I never could find a plant bushy enough to grace it permanently UNTIL last week when I wandered into a gardening store to buy dirt for repotting. And there it was. The Irish Moss. For your viewing pleasure I give you ‘Fro Pig:

For many weeks I have found it unnecessary to post the long dormant “Hand Injury Tally” simply because I haven’t had any injuries. I was starting to believe that maybe I finally had a grasp on tool function and was possibly developing skill with them. What a concept! Skill! However, I managed to prove my self wrong this week. With a few fell swoops of idiocy I accrued not one, not two, but four minor lacerations (nothing major, have a seat.) to the hands! FOUR! Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, …

Hand Injury Tally: week 14

One mystery crisscrossed surface laceration on the back of my hand, probably a result of out-of-control saw blades. Who knows how it got there.
One half inch long gouge on the outside side of my right thumb from accidentally dragging it across the pointy sharp painful part of my calipers. Felt really alive when I forgot about it and dipped the thumb in firecoat on accident (firecoat consists of boric acid and denatured alcohol. Ouch!)
One quarter inch split on my right pointer finger, probably due to either a saw blade or file. Hurts.
One stab wound courtesy of my brand new titanium solder pick.

BONUS injury story: One of my classmates this week managed to drill into the tip of her thumb. That was an awesome explosion of swearing. It was like the 4th of July with bad words instead of fireworks. She was drilling the pilot holes for some stones and instead of using something to hold the ring, like a ring clamp, she used her hand. Bad move. When the drill bit made it through the metal it continued on into her finger about a quarter inch. Here’s the thing. This girl’s tough. I consider myself able to deal with injuries well, but this woman just got up, washed it off, lobbed three band-aids on it and sat back down and kept working. No kidding. It was impressive. I sat there entire time with my mouth gaping open in disbelief (i know you can picture it). I strive for that sort of indifference to pain.

This past week we got to modify a gold ring shank to accommodate two heads for small 3mm stones and then set a pearl. A setting which, friends, involves nothing more than 2 part epoxy-ing the thing onto a rod. Simple enough I suppose. But simple’s not really the opperative word of the (or any) day today. The shady folks in the GIA project torture lab dreamed up having us half-shank the damn ring WITH the pearl attached. So, normally when you half shank a ring like this you would pull the pearl OFF the ring. Even Doug admitted that this was a bit heinous of a task and said "good luck, just dont toast the pearl!"....Why would you pull the pearl you ask? Its delicate. Anything can damage it. Looking at it cross eyed could damage it. So how does one half shank a ring with a pearl attached that would almost never happen in the field? You submerge it in water. What happens when you submerge a stone in water then hit it with a torch? The water likes to climb the surface of the ring and extinguish your flame. So how do you get two solder seams to flow on a ring that’s submerged in a tiny swimming pool with a torch that goes out every thirty two seconds? You put on a larger torch tip and fire that bad boy up as high as it will go and torch the hell out it and hope the water doesnt boil before the solder flows! I also took a tip form a classmate and used some tweezers to help conduct some heat and got those suckers soldered. The tweezers sort of acted like a water deflector. It worked. But it was tedious stuff. I’m glad its over but I’ll tell you what, I heard through a small grape vine that our 5th bench exam is a replica of this ring. Like, once wasn’t enough, so here it is again. Awesome.

Speaking of bench exams, we had our 4th bench this past Thursday. It was a day and a half project. We were allotted 9 hours to complete construction on a leaf shaped pendant with a 3mm set stone. Contents of the project bag were fairly predictable: one piece of silver wire, one head, one sheet of metal, some silver stock, a stone and a pattern. We were also given the parameters for the exam which involved a “job sheet” describing the piece and a counter sketch. And then the only instruction we were given as to how to construct this was a sheet of paper with 6 horribly rendered drawings of what it should look like. Think about the illustration-only assembly instructions you get with a bookshelf for instance. that’s what we got. And you know, ive said before that you cant ask direct questions during these things. But we were blessed with two previously made examples of the pendant that we were allowed to look at to sort of absorb the design. And both of the examples had design differences. So you sort of had to use your instincts to decide what would be aesthetically pleasing to look at and go from there. Anyway the exam was supposed to only be a day and a half. I got mine done in 8 hours and 20 minutes, but I’d say the majority of the class will be extending the exam into Monday. It was probably the most challenging exam we’ve had to date, simply because we had to hand fabricate this entire piece. We were allowed to take some creative liberties with the somewhat uninteresting design, so I did spruced mine up with some fancy filing and gave it some dimension. I think it looks good, but time will tell if Doug does.

We have a total of fourteen project books we have to go through in 26 weeks. We just wound up week 14 and we’re in book 10. That leaves us four more books for the next 12 weeks. You kind of get the idea of how ridiculous these projects are getting and how time consuming this is if you think about it. The project we start on Monday for example involves a circle pendant with 24 (TWENTY FOUR!) prong set stones. And from what I just read yesterday about it, it involves two microscopic prong replacements. Cant wait. So needless to say, they’re getting more challenging (as I expect) but I LOVE IT!! Love. Love. Love. It.

I also got my “spider” pendant and the gypsy ring back that I talked about last blog, so here are a couple pictures of the two. For the spider there’s a front and back shot, and the gypsy is just a quickie I took before turning it back in. enjoy!

To all of my friends and family near and far from me, I miss you all so much. But I think about you all daily and cannot wait for you all to see what I’ve been doing in person. I just feel so lucky to be here. I know I say that a lot, but I do. And when you have this joy and gratefulness in your heart, I think its important to let the people you love the most know it. So thank you everyone for the energy and good vibes and have a beautiful weekend.

Until next week, be well.

My my, time is flying.

2008-04-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I’m aware that its been 2 weeks since the last post. I also realize that due to the amount of things that happen for me in two weeks that I cannot possibly elaborate on eeevvvvvvrrryyything in detail the coffee pot simply does not keep the coffee fresh that long So I will spare you the thirty-three chapter novel and instead touch on some highlights and we’ll take it from there.

We did more chains, friends. This time it was what my instructor referred to as “simple repairs” (implying to me at least that the possibility for it to be way uglier was there) and to get us motivated for the task we were treated to a bouquet of songs regarding chains… chain of fools, chain gang, unchained melody, unchain my heart etc. you get the idea. Pretty funny actually. It reminded me of homecoming time at my high school and they would try really hard to get the student body excited about the game/dance/pep rally’s by playing Queen’s “we will rock you” , which I still have a hard time listening to with out flashing back to my Flock of Seagulls/Tony Hawk hair and heavy steel toed shoes… Anyway, We got to pull damaged links and do repair work on three different styles: a simple chain (link looped through link), a double linked chain and a serpentine. Oh what fun that was. I believe I’ve mentioned that I dislike chains, but apparently this is a common unavoidable fact of life in the trade. Awesome. The hardest was the double link since trying to figure out how to put it back together correctly was the main issue. I’ve never felt so academically handicapped in my life. I dislike puzzles and math, and this seemed to incoprporate many of these fears. Suppose that I should get used to that feeling. All I am asking of you, reader, is to take care of your chains. And if they bust, buy a new one. Please.

I’ve completely lost track of how many projects we’ve done, but I believe as of this past Friday we were on 29 or 30. Or something. We’ve been getting into more complex projects containing quite a bit of hand fabricating. For instance, we’re working on and by working on I mean no one has completed this thing YET a pendant we call the “spider” because its got a spider design on it (so clever!) And a prong set oval fancy cut. Oh and its in a setting that we had to build from the ground up. As in: given a nice piece of wire and there you go. Make it. OH and its got a gallery back on it, which I can only describe as a layered dimensional piece. But its been fun. Challenging would be a good description. But fun. We’ve had the usual round of disasters and fear combined with stress and blood pressure fluctuations and we’re still standing. And, still working on it. So no picture of it yet. But here’s a picture of a classmates failed attempt at trying to re-prong her setting because she accidentally sheared off the prong tip (a valiant effort to not only exercise our new re-prong skills, but to save herself an additional half hour of work. Which failed miserably.)

Another highlight was the introduction of flush settings. This is where the stone is set flush with the surface of the ring. Which involves drilling and opening up the pilot holes of the ring, and then as calmly as possible burring a seat for the stone. In our case we were setting 2.25 mm stones. Four of them. And if you’ve done everything right you should be able to hear a faint click sound when it snaps in.

Jeweler Dictionary of sounds to listen for (in progress):
1) Click: stone snapped in just fine
2) Crack, crunch or something akin to a salt grinder: you damaged the stone, don’t look. Go for a walk. Cry.
3) Sizzle-**ping**: &%#@*, you just quenched the stone. Go for another walk. Maybe stop for martini. Cry more.

Happily when we received this project we discovered that we were given two rings. One was for practice, one for real. These folks here are no fools to newbie’s doing flush sets. So hack away we did at the first ring. And really, we all made honest efforts to do this right. We tried. Almost all of us got the first ring DONE, but its debatable as to the quality of that finished product. My first trial by error ring looks similar to this: (illustration courtesy of "paint" on my computer")

Now, the second ring went fine. I got a rhythm down and got all four stones set level and flush. I haven’t gotten this one back yet so I could be completely mistaken. Completely.
Stay tuned for progress.

One of the coolest projects we’re working on currently is what’s referred to as a gypsy style ring. Its a common style for men. The one we’re working on right now has an 8x6 mm oval faceted stone flush set on top with two 2.25 mm flush set stones on the side. This project isn’t too hard, but I’m excited about learning how to do this because its incredibly similar in design to a ring my dad wore that I would love to rebuild or duplicate some day, and up until this week, its construction was a vague mystery to me. Again, this is a work in progress, so no picture of the final piece, but here’s an example of what I’m talking about:

So this past Monday upon my return from a nice relaxing weekend in the desert, I was greeted by my classmates bemoaning the fact that 80% of the class got back this project we worked on (mentioned in blog 11) marked incomplete. Which is huge. It was the project that had the emerald cut stone and three 2.25 mm’s set in a pendant. So this was obviously not something I wanted to hear after my weekend off. I was a bit tense and not looking forward to re-doing this project. Much to my delight, however, when I opened up my bench I found a grading sheet wedged in there for this project with a grade of CS. I’m not gloating, but I was relieved that I was one of the three people in the class that executed this project successfully. I earned a few side-eye stares and under the breath mutters in jest when they figured out I passed the project. WHEW! That Monday we also (finally) got the results of our third bench exam back…. Doug walked around and handed these things back to us and was commenting to everyone as he went. Dropping off my neighbors piece he said to her “good job, great work” and when he got to my bench he completely came to a halt and handed mine back slowwwwwly. *insert moment of tension* then he said something I will never forget. He handed this piece to me and said “This was one of the best bench exams I’ve graded in months. Exemplary work.” and then proceeded to tell me as hard as he tried, he couldn’t find a single thing wrong with my exam. Thirty years of experience couldn’t find a flaw. I was flabbergasted. Completely. There was also a bit of humble embarrassment as my classmates gawked at me for the second time in twenty minutes. I cant tell you all how hard I try every project to perfect every move I make. And for thirteen weeks I’ve been trying to meet my goal of executing a flawless piece. And I managed to do it on a very nerve wracking bench exam. Who knew?!!

bench exam. crappy photo.

We also had our half way progress meetings. I’m in excellent standing, I have one absence, no tardies and a 90% quiz average. I have 100% completion on my projects. During our brief meeting he told me that he could tell I have a hard time executing some things, but I persevere and get the job done. He noted that perseverance is the key in this trade and if this is what I wanted to do, I was well on my way. He told me to expect to start out somewhere near the bottom of the proverbial totem pole (which I do) but that he estimates it wont take me long to move around and up.
I don’t expect miracles when I leave here, I don’t even expect to get my dream job yet. I understand that I could do this another ten years and still be the new kid. I am prepared to go the next half of this course as absorbent and receptive as I have been, and hopefully when I leave here my portfolio and my work will speak for my dedication and desire to work in this industry. I just want to be really good at this. And I feel like I might be ok.

on a side note, when i first started class i had a haircut. and in the back it slopes down to one side. its fairly rad. anyway, i had a classmate (as gingerly as possible becasue i think she thought i was unaware it did this) point out that my hair was "kinda crooked" in the back. and i told her (as a joke) that i was preparing to bring back the rat tail. to which she laughed. SO, i am. i have been. growing the rat tail i mean. and its more of a joke now. i told everyone i'm not cutting it until i graduate. so here's week 13 and its still around. i'd like to thank Barrie my awesome hair woman for stylishy incorporating it into my head flawlessly. Longer story short: my classmate Heather told me she was going to make me a scrunchy for my rat tail. and she did. its the worlds tiniest scrunchy. how cool is this? its orange with white polka dots, and its the first scrunchy i've ever owned!! me and charlie with our new scrunchies:

Until next week, dear friends. Be well.

On list of skills: melting things.

2008-03-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-16T09:47:00.000-07:00

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'

2008-03-09T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-02T09:20:00.000-08:00

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.

retip retip retip

2008-02-24T10:25:00.000-08:00

I quietly suspect the reason that jewelers are mainly hidden in the back of the store is correlated in some way to the high tendency for swear words and temper tantrums -other side effects include (but not limited to) high blood pressure and spontaneous crying, which is of course, based on zero medical information.

A friend of mine and I were discussing possible improvements that could be made to any studio that would adequately accommodate said fits. The only thing we could agree on was a sound proof padded room. See, at the door, you’d have to take off your shoes, select the appropriate sized helmet and put it on, and then enter the room. In one corner there’ll be one of those ridiculous inflatable sand-in-the-base punching things they make for kids with an annoying primary colored clown smiling on it. Remember those? You smacked them and they came right back up. Awesome. You can punch it, kick it, slap the poo out of it. Whatever. And you can swear in there if you want because its SOUNDPROOF. Brilliance. And when you’re done having your tantrum, you can go lie in the corner that’s filled with piles of fuzzy blankets and teddy bears and cry it out. Tissues included. And when you LEAVE the room, a small tray pops out from the wall with cookies and warm milk on it. HOW outstanding would that be? And you could literally apply this in any work situation! Go ahead, sweet reader, imagine!

Moving on

Based on what I just wrote, im sure that you can take a guess at how this week went. The week started off relatively similar to the other weeks, only that we had Monday off. So the first day back was a quiz day. This quiz we took was one of the hardest to date. Im not going to bother you with my score, suffice to say that I passed. I knew before I looked at the scores that I didn’t do as well as I have been, so I made the necessary adjustments in my head to prepare for it prior to seeing it. Which helped me avoid aforementioned crying. Ive discovered that my expectations for myself here are far higher than they have ever been in my entire life. I have set this standard for myself that doesn’t give me much room to stumble or fall or make mistakes, although I know that these things are inherent to my success. So when discussing my quiz with Jerry, he quoted someone and said that you’ll make a thousand mistakes before you do it right. Or to that effect. I don’t know what it was about what he said, but it made me feel better.

We made split bails this week. some call the rabbit ear bails. I was working on mine and I was to the point that I was going to solder it to the head, and I thought “something doesn’t look right”, so when I showed it to Jerry, he handed me another piece of stock to start over. Nice. Turns out my bail was big enough to slide on to one of those thick Run DMC rope chains.

Also on the schedule were a series of repairs to “BeBe Anderson” (again, all projects have names, like customers). Jerry started this lecture by saying that if you walk into any of the classes that are further along and just say “BeBe Anderson”, you’ll hear swearing and see people throwing things. Encouraging. So the basis of this was we had to “simulate” prong wear by filing down two prongs (intentionally damaging our own work!) and file away a third completely parallel to the girdle of the stone (try and keep up, dear reader). The one that we filed away we had to rebuild using stock in the shape of an “L”. hence L prong. Or that’s what he called it.

So far:Two retips and an L prong.

In the course of this re-tipping, one of my classmates was tightening his stone (he was allllllmost done) and the prong completely buckled to the side.

See:

The international sign for a buckled prong is now represented in our class by tilting ones head to the side.

How did I do you ask? Well. I got through the retips, I did the L prong. All was (notice “was”) well until I realized that I now had three juicy prongs and one emaciated prong. So I talked it out with Jerry. And the consensus was that it would be far more aesthetically pleasing to look at with four equal prongs, but it wasn’t necessary to do the 4th unless I wanted the practice……. Of course I wanted the practice. Long story short, I got the 4th one done, and when TIGHTENING MY STONE, hear a faint crack. Yes. Crack. it’s the quietest most horrific sound anyone in this industry has ever heard. That crack was my stone. DAMMMMMMNNNNNNNNIT! Anyway, I learned how to reset stones this week too.

I was prepared to leave this week with my head hanging and my proverbial tail tucked. I felt like I learned so many humbling lessons this week, and have vowed to work harder and study as necessary to keep ahead. And I’m trying not to be too hard on myself in regards to any stumbles I may have. But you know, I got the boost I needed at my 6th week satisfactory progress review! I have no absences, no tardies. I have a 100% completion rate on my projects which he said was unusual to have (whoot!), my quiz average is 93% (would have been higher…..), I soared through my first bench exam, I passed all my counter sketching… things look good! REALLY good. And the best was when he said that he could tell by my work and the questions that I ask that I really want to be here, and that students like me are what makes teaching worth it to him. It was a really sweet moment, a grand ending to an otherwise challenging week and makes me look forward to the next 19 weeks with hope, clarity and resolve.

For Kristy, i resurrected "Jeweler Monkey" enjoy.

No hand injuries to report this week!

week 7 preview: more repair work, earrings earrings earrings quiz and bench test #2.

Be well my friends.

Lets get to the meat of it

2008-02-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

NOW we’re talking.

Enough of this namby-pamby silver working stuff for us.

With a swift kick in the metalsmithing pants, we were thrust into the heart and soul of gemstone handling and gold work this week.

We started the week off by just soldering head after head (and by head I mean the prongy claw looking thing you set stones in) on to brass rings and cutting seats. Now, I’ve never done this. I’ve watched it done, but never done it personally. Its pretty rad.

Yes I said rad.

Following that we got to learn how to set round brilliant cuts and shape prongs in eighty jillion shapes. Now, they don’t give us real diamonds to set seeing as we’re all pretty new at this, so what we get are pretty good looking representations called spinels. it’s a rock, just not the one you would pay big bucks for. For the most part I found the cutting of the seats and the setting of the stones pretty easy, it’s the attempting not to chip or disfigure the stone that’s the problem. Plenty of classmates had to get new stones due to chipping. I was fortunate enough to not have to. ALTHOUGH I did have to replace one head at some point because I managed to successfully melt one prong into a tiny ball of metal. Sweet.

I do!
We also dove right into installing our own heads onto bands that we had to shape to fit ourselves. Which, dear friend, involves filing precise angles. Which sounds deceptively easy the first time you hear about it and attempt it. But I managed to get the hang of it pretty quickly.

If you try and pick up a stone with tweezers, or your large fat fingers, or you jam on it too hard trying to set it, the stones fly.
Did I mention stones flying? Stones fly. Like how birds do, but no wings.

What do you do when they do this? You go hunting in the direction of the stones flight path and pray that you find it. I heard more colorful phrases then I care to repeat as people watched their stones take flight. I also saw lots of folks in the downward search crouch which is a universal sign for everyone else in the class to help look for something tiny and lost.

See:
For the most part this week was all new to me, but working on gold is way easier then silver just because its so much harder of a metal, therefore less susceptible to dings, dents, scratches. I like it. Its also starting to get really fun in class. We’re all bonding pretty well and I feel like ive been blessed with a great group of folks that im relating to really well and developing great friendships with . I’m looking forward to meeting these guys out in the field and forging awesome working relationships with.

speaking of bonding,

This week we organized a get together. Our first “bar night” as a class. Hooray! So last night I dragged my roommate and co-conspirator out to meet some of these people I talk about nonstop. There were about 5 or 6 of my actual classmates and some of the kids from the graduate gemology program there. It was SO much fun, and we all just sat around and talked about other things then class. But let me tell you, when we really did talk about class (to vent of course), it was so so so nice to be surrounded by people who spoke my language! People that I could use words like porosity, facet, culet, and alloy around and they knew what I was talking about. I don’t feel so nerdy around them. Ha. Ha.

Hand injury tally for week five:

Miscellaneous grabbed metal while its hot burns: 3
Combination file stabslash on left thumb: 1
Mizzy wheel took off and ran across my finger: 2

Also accidentally inhaled half of metal scrap dust when I accidentally knocked the tray off my bench with my big awkward shrek sized elbow. My lungs will be worth more then my funeral will cost one day, so please, dump me off at a refinery.

Until next week, my friends. Be well.

my hand is cramped in the hammer holding position

2008-02-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

Terms you will need to understand before proceeding:

Anneal: to subject an alloy, metal, or glass to a process of heating and slow cooling to make it tougher and less brittle (in other words: torch it)

Rolling mill: a machine with rollers that press metal, usually in ingot form, into sheets or bars of the desired shape and size (which is a very lengthy manual process, which while doing sort of makes you look like an organ grinder)

I don’t particularly remember what order this week went in. what I remember from the blur is:

quiz
quiz
bench test
rolling mill annealing rolling mill annealing rolling mill annealing
hammer hammer
hammer
annealing.

What I DO know is that week four passed without one scar caused by any tool or torch in my bench

however….

Tuesday evening at my exhilarating arts and crafts hell job, three and a half minutes into my shift I managed to get a cardboard induced paper cut on my left ring finger from a “t-shirt form” for fabric painting, of all things. Damn you cardboard.

So this week. We had one project, which was actually like three (hundred) in one. The first part of it involved pouring molten metal into ingot molds. An ingot is basically a rod of metal, in this case, sterling silver, made from silver shot or scrap. From there you take that ingot and you roll it through what’s called a rolling mill and flatten it into sheet, stock, bezel or whatever size of metal you need. Step three (thousand four hundred and sixty six) involves taking your newly formed sheet (or fill in the blank) and shearing off a piece to form a ring. Which in our case was one of two rings. The first one, “simones” ring, was a simple band originally sized to a dainty size 4 (conjuring pal Kelly) and we had to stretch it to a 10.

Its quite a strectch pun intended, but imagine if you will.

Anyway, the trick here is the annealing of the metal every size and a half or so. If not, your ring pops open and you get to start over. What im happy to announce is mine is one of the only ones that didn’t pop open. Hallelujah.

Our second project ala ingot was to make a ring and bezel and set our first stone. Lots of manual fabrication here. Lots. As in:

hammer anneal hammer anneal hammer anneal solder solder swear solder hammer, repeat.

The band in this case sort of wraps around and we had to file notches to accommodate the bezel cup (which is one of the many ways you can set a stone). Now, I wouldn’t normally be sweating what out rightly appeared to be a simple fabrication project, but craftsmanship is the holy word of this school. No gaps.no deviations. no creatively winging-it. The measurements have to be pretty dead on and if it’s over or under what the book says, you get to tweak tweak tweak it until its right or in some cases, you get to start over. Thankfully most of us have discovered the art of patience and doing things step by step to avoid having to completely backpedal and set ourselves back.

My quizzes were pretty good this week. I got a perfect on one quiz, but the one on Thursday I missed 2 questions! And they were the most ridiculous misses! aren’t they always?. None of us were particularly shiny stars this week and we’re all sort of feeling the heat being turned up on the pot of expectation here. We also had our first bench test this past Thursday in which we had to take a rough casting and clean it up and slap a Florentine finish on it. Sounded approachable and no-brainy until I saw the ring. See friend, every project we do has a name, like a customer. This one was called “carries curved ring”. I would like to emphasize the “curved” part of that sentence. Anyway, it had curves in all the weird spots. All the spots that are awkward to file or sand evenly, OH and have I mentioned the florentine finish had to go on one side of the curvy part and took up roughly 30% of the surface of this side? Yeah. OH and it was virtually impossible for me to do this with the ring clamped. So if you looked around during the test you would find us all free handing it and silently mouthing swear words whilst trying not to puncture anything with the ability to bleed with our gravers.

A side note:

There’s a guy in my class who’s in his early 50’s and is funny.so we talk quite a bit. actually, my whole row is comedy relief. Well, one day we were discussing the catalogue the school puts out and how they always have these professional looking students in the photos. We were wondering where they find these said students. So we were trying to figure out how WE would represent the program if they asked US to be in the catalogue.

How would Betsy pose?(channels Kristy)

Results:

Anyway, so i'm still upright after this week. We're all through the "firsts" of most everything and are well aware of of what the expectations are in reagards to our work, quizes and tests. It was hard not knowing what format to expect on some of this simply beacuse you have no idea what or how to study.But now we know. YAR!

next week preview: handling gemstones at the bench! stay tuned for stories of gems flying and students on the ground stone hunting.

in peace and solidarity my friends.
be well.

Jar of rocks and stuff.

2008-02-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

I’ve been in metalworking for a few years now. Along the way I’ve picked up good base knowledge of lots of useful things. I can cut, I can file, solder, sand, finish, cast, mold make, polish oh lord can I polish etc etc. Lost somewhere in the nuggets of what I’ve learned were the “little things” I should have learned too. Like the previously mentioned systems of measurement. Or how to do basic things with gravers. Or how to use calipers effectively. All of which would have at some point made me a more effective metalsmith.

All of this occurred to me this past week.

And what ive liked my experience thus far to is this simple analogy (follow me if you will):

I am a jar filled with these rocks of knowledge of what I do, and this school, well, they’re pouring sand into my jar filling in all the gaps with the things I did not know and adding more rocks. And it’s the most amazing feeling to have someone turn on those proverbial light bulbs you knew about, but never fully understood.

Anyone with me?

I’m starting to feel a bit of confidence in my craft. Like I’m being issued dangerous ammunition and weapons to fire it at will. In like 22 weeks or so.

Aside from the revelations…..

This week it picked up drastically and the gap between the people that get it and those that don’t is widening. We had 2 quizes this week and I got a 100% on one and a 94% on the other. one conversion question stopped my brain from operating. Have I mentioned I dislike math?

and I managed to stay on schedule with my projects. In the course of one week we went from learning how to fire up a torch to soldering basics to sizing rings up and down and then we wound this week up with pouring ingots of silver for next weeks 3564 projects that will involve rolling out metal on a rolling mill. On top of all of that we’re learning metal chemistry science!!! *shakes fist at sky* and doing counter sketching a boiled down definition: tiny drawings of jewelery pieces for job purposes and having basic stone essentials facets, anatomy of, sizes, shapes blahblahblah thumped at us.

So while I feel good about knowing most of the stuff, there is certainly this pile of information being dumped and left for each of us to sort through and make sense of. No fear my friends, I am surely getting my moneys worth of knowledge and sleepless evenings.

I study:

on breaks,
on my lunch,
in my car before work
at home
and anywhere else that can accomodate me and my books.

I have no life. I havent left the general vicinity of north county for like two weeks. I just drive the loop to school, to work, then home. repeat x5.

And I suspect that this will only amplify as the weeks go on.

There is no doubt in my head that I will come out of here a far better jeweler that when I came in.

Speaking of torches and whatnot, I managed to slide by the whole week without burning myself, but I did manage to slice a nice diagonal pattern into my finger late Wednesday with my saw. Oh and stab myself with a paperclip. True story.

This is what happened to my classmates ring on her first soldering attempt. i told her she should mount this ring in a tiny shadow box and hang it on the wall to always remind herself that we all start somewhere. And perhaps years from now when she's a sucessful jewler/artist, she can look back at that ring and see how far she has come.

We all have proverbial mountains to climb.

melty.

Week four sneek peek: 2 quizzes coming up again and thursday is my first bench test! my goal this next week is to make it five days without slicing, stabbing or burning anything attached to my body. i keep my expectations low in that department to avoid letting myself down.

wish me luck!

Be well.

my days of hand modeling are officially o-v-e-r.

2008-01-27T10:45:00.000-08:00

I used to find solace in the fact that being an artist usually required very little in the way of math. And by very little I mean almost none. As in: I can successfully use a ruler, I can balance my checkbook, I can read the measuring cup with ease.

I’m ok with that.

Week two however introduced me (quite in depth) to official jeweler math. Not that I was unaware that it was there, just that its never been pounded into me quite so extensively in my life.

Looooooong gone are my days of artistically “winging it” or “eyeballing” anything.

Yessiree. The official system of weights and measures is called the Troy system. On top of learning a completely new weight system updownandsideways, I was also thumped with all sorts of tasty conversion scales, different metal alloys, karats and at the end of that, politely suggested to that it would be wise to learn the metric system. Apparently the common standard issue Ameri-kan way of measuring things is not only obsolete most everywhere else in the world, its antique. It doesn’t work for nearly anything I do.

Awesome

I am also getting really good at measuring whatever you can think of with my spankin new vernier calipers. For instance: my head is like, 116.8 mm wide, if I remember correctly. My friend was measuring his nose. And I caught one of my classmates measuring his kneecap.

Watch out jewelry, here we come!

I also had math homework for the first time in years. Yeeeaaarrrs. Monday night I sat down with my homework and a cup of hot cocoa (for comfort) and proceeded to panic. By the way, I had to root through three boxes of stuff to see if I even HAD a calculator anymore.

Turns out I do and it’s the exact same one I never used in high school math.

The good news is I got through the 15 conversion, weights and measures questions while sobbing and swearing in one hour and 20 minutes but I don’t know how I did yet. Stay tuned.

Does anyone know what a Florentine finish looks like? I do. This entire week at some point or another each day, I was slapping a Florentine finish on something. I had to. Our instructor said its on our first bench test in a week and a half. I florentined not one, not two, but four practice brass rings (all the way around), one of my own because I hate brass, and the sides of our mini man rings, project # 5,895. I even had a dream about it two nights ago. Come on.

Ive been sleeping, eating and breathing textures and measurement systems this week.

Pleh

Hand Injury Total for week two is as follows:

saw blade finger slice: 1
file slices even though I have safety edges on them:4
minor stab wound from brand new graver: 1
miscellaneous saran wrap serrated edge cut early thursday morning trying to wrap up sandwhich: 1.

Week three preview: two quizzes and we start with the torches! Stay tuned for burn stories!

In peace and solidarity, my friends.

Week One, 25 more to go.

2008-01-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

new people, new environment, new emotions. its almost too much to try to describe and have you, sweet reader, understand how i feel or what I'm going through. but one thing I'm good at is trying.

I knew the best way to blog about all this new experience was to sort of jot down the overload on paper as the week progressed, and then i could compile it into some sort of comprehensive mish-mash for the rest of you to sort through and digest.

good luck.

thing is, i washed the paper i wrote it all on on accident. Lucky for me i folded it so many times and jammed it so deep in my pocket that it sort of survived.

remnants of WEEK ONE HI LITES:

walking up to that door my first day of class was as emotional as you would expect it to be for me, considering everyone and everything that was given up to get here.

vow to self: kick some serious a**.

Debit card in hand, my first experience with the cafe on campus revealed that not only are espresso shots only 95 cents, they also only take cash. Lucky for me that my new favorite barista (after Ms. M. Pants, of course), William, let me take the espresso on my word that i would pay the next day. oh and did i mention that i asked for a double, but he accidentally made me a quadruple for the price of a double? true story.

an honor system for live giving caffeine. bless you, my new friend.

I have two instructors, Jerry and Jack. Between the two of them they have roughly 50 years of experience in the industry. They're intelligent and enlightening and I'm feeling grateful to be learning from them.

In our classroom we have what is called a smart board. I don't know if any of you have ever seen one of these, but I'm going to try and explain how cool this thing is. for all practical purposes, it looks like a dry erase board. however, its hooked up to Jerry's computer and he's able to display his computer screen on the smart board through a projector on the ceiling. NOW, what makes it a smart board is that he can pick up a special pen, draw on the board and then move what he just drew around with his hand . for instance: we had a demo on sharpening and customizing our gravers and he popped up a screen that showed an unaltered graver. then he drew on that projection to show us where to cut the spine on it. and then he moved that illustration over with his hand and drew on it again to show us how NOT to cut it. coolest thing i've ever seen. Like that movie with Tom Cruise in it, but not that cool.

the smart board also is hooked up to a really sweet set of cameras that zoom in on the bench he's at and project the pieces he's demonstration techniques on. to give you an idea, his thumb projects on the screen about the same size as a human head. so the demos are pretty detailed and I'm glad that we don't all have to hover over his bench to see what he's doing.

My bench... well i chose a bench at an end of a row. i like my space. maybe Kristy is the only one that will find this funny, i also chose the bench closest to the fu**ing steamer, which, when used, is a very loud pressurized steam machine that I'm fairly certain will slowly rob me of hearing in my right ear over the next 6 months.

you think i cant hear and i mumble now? give it time.. give it time...

did i mention the class is carpeted with industrial carpeting? i find it beneficial only when i drop something and it doesn't go bouncing across the room or clangclangclang across the floor. but its weird and its inhibiting my ability to fly across the class in my wheeled chair.

So on top of bench assignments and falling in love with the smart board....

I was issued a metric ton of tools which i was elated to find out i get to keep at the end of the program. good to know i get some "free" stuff. They stay in class until the last day, when we can take them home. but the flex shaft stays. boo!!

The first week I started and finished three projects, modified gravers, tool steel, files, clamps, bench pins and other assorted metal rods to fit our needs. I also started a supplemental project (which is optional time permitting) that i can use to practice technique on. we have spent most of the week setting up benches, getting acclimated and some of us are dusting ourselves off while others weeding through the madness that we call jewelery.

i received two of my three projects back on Friday. We are graded based on level of completion and execution of what you've learned up until that point. no A's or F's. you get one of three grades here : I for incomplete, C for Complete or CS for Complete Satisfactory. CS is the highest, C is what you need to pass and if you get a I you have opportunities to fix whats wrong with the piece and turn it in again.

puffs peacock feathers: I got CS's on both! whoot!

prior to getting any of them back, my instructor Jack called me over to his bench and showed me my ring. He shook my hand and said that my work was outstanding, and that it doesn't get any better than that.... After that long week, hearing something like that just made me feel so awesome and grateful. They're also going to be using my project as example on Monday lecture!

geek puts on glasses and flays out buck tooth smile

The class is exactly what i expected, plus more. Its challenging what i already know and pushing me in a direction where I'm learning more patience, good methods and better techniques. By the end of the 26 weeks, i will have completed 54 projects, 20 quizzes, 8 standard bench tests and a finals week consisting of three bench tests and one written exam.

WHEW!

25 more weeks to go!

Orientation Day 01/10/08

2008-01-19T19:56:00.001-08:00

Orientation day!

synopsis of my unofficial first day on campus is as follows:

i arrived promptly and well caffienated at 8 a.m. to a room filled with Einstiens Brothers bagels, boxes of delicious coffee and my competition...er.. i mean classmates.

they took my picture for my ID. what i want to know is why and how one giant pimple knows its an important picture day and schedules its arrival for the morning of the said important photo?
atleast my hair looked good.

we had a half hour "break" where they let all the other students come in to meet us. so at that point it was a half caffinated "meet and greet" type thing and according to my new friend whatshisname from Toronto, this happens monthly. so i should prepare to do this with every new class that rolls in. atleast there's free food.

the staff at GIA called this "networking"

Lots of foreigners. lots. i'd say 1/3 of the people there today were from other countries. I caught India, China, Japan and Canada.

OH, and one guy from Alabama.

I was having a nice chat with a young woman in my class that i suspected to be about 23 or so based on how well she carried herself and her conversation. turns out she's not only 16 years old, but graduated early from high school on some expedited genius program or something. she was born in 1991. *bangs head on table*. maybe i should introduce her to my nephew.

the good news is she asked me my age before all of this conversing happened and she thought i was 24 or 25 (bless her heart). she finally believed me when i showed her my sweet ass grey streak and told her i was 6 years away from my 20 year reunion.

i got a cute little parking permit for my car and on my way to install it i almost got run over by one of the backstreet boys driving a large Denali at 330 mph through the parking lot. this was ten minutes after the security guys gave a speech about driving 5 mph in the lot to avoid hurting anyone.

asshole.

theres a cafe that not only serves food, but i spied a very shiny espresso machine that may possibly become my lifeline the next 6 months. i think its good to identify your life rafts immediately when in a new environment.

the bathrooms are very ambient. low lighting. clean. sorta swanky and comfy all at once. not that i plan on hanging out in there.

i suspect that the lights are low to provide a soothing environment for which to decompress and cry in .

Overall today was cool. I sized up my class in 5 minutes . The one person i found intriguing was the woman in the wheelchair with lots of irish tattoos, a backpack with lots of military patches and a full rack of ribbons on it, dogtags around her neck and a southern accent. and awesome custom black chuck taylors and more holes in her ears then me. I'd like to know her story. she's in my class, so i'm looking forward to that process. i love meeting new people.

Day one is Monday!
I'm sure that i'll be blogging here and there about my progress. stay tuned!