Silver Orchid redux

A couple of months ago I finished (or thought I had finished) this pendant. Its organic look arose from a thoroughly organic process, involving as much accident as intent. You can read about its early life here and here. In the second post I noted K's opinion that it needed to be hung from a chain, not a rubber cord, "because the pendant needed to be seen as being worthy of a beautiful chain. Because it's so weird. And ugly." As you can see from the photo, I did put it on quite a nice oxidized chain. And the pendant has been hanging around waiting for a buyer ever since.

I knew it wasn't going to be an easy sell. This isn't a pendant for everyone and maybe it's a pendant for no one but me, but that's ok - I like it. Still, I've never been completely happy with how it hung on the chain and so I fiddled around with some other options, including a beautiful dark grey silk cord which I'll definitely use for something else.

The other day I decided to make a chain, just because it's something I haven't done. Now that was fun - and that statement certainly qualifies me as a full on metal nerd. It took a couple of hours of snipping wire, balling the ends, pickling, curling, twining, tumbling, oxidizing, and polishing, but at the end I had a lovely long chain, a bracelet and a couple of dangles for earrings. About half way through the process I realized the chain was meant for the Silver Orchid pendant. "Meant for" as in, they'd look great together, but also "meant for" as in intended for. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had a hunch that what the pendant needed was a longer, more substantial chain that could match its organicness. (What? you'd prefer organicity?) And over the past week or two, as I've been working at work and wishing I had time to make jewelry, what I kept wanting to make was a chain, which I thought was a little odd, but who am I to question my unconscious mind?

Here's the result. There's no clasp - the chain is maybe 24" long and just slips over the head. Notice that the alignment of the pendant has changed as well. I also attached the cluster of pearls to the end of the chain rather than to the pendant itself - much neater.


Here's another picture showing how the pearls and pendant relate. I think this necklace might just be finished.

Metalliferous

(to the tune of Maria from West Side Story)
♬ Metalliferous, Metalliferous, ♫
I've just been to a store named Metalliferous, ♪
And suddenly that name
Will never be the same to meeeeee..... ♬

What a day it's been! I took the train the the enyce, as I like to call it, and walked from Penn Station to 34 W. 46th St. On the way I window-shopped, thought about stopping for an impromptu haircut, avoided the temptations of the bead shops and shoe shops I passed along the way (though I will admit to going into the Skechers store in search of a pair of sandal-like sneakers - but I resisted). I got to Metalliferous (such a great name) feeling totally virtuous for having gotten a little exercise. It's on the second floor and it's very small, with tall shelves and counters that make it feel even smaller. Every square inch, from ceiling to floor is covered wiht jewelry making stuff. Even though I ignored all the materials related to wax casting and all the colored copper wire, there was still so much to look at and desire.

One of the things on my Peters Valley list of supplies was "Needle file set: (12) inexpensive". I looked at a wall of files from teensy to large and wondered, "Why 12?" Ok, let's leave the files for later. I noticed a woman who works there helping another woman collect items on a list. Aha, I thought, that's how it works for us newbies. Then I noticed that all the chain and findings were behind the counter - how was I supposed to figure out what I wanted? Aha, customers can go behind the counter and finger the merchandise. Someone finally noticed me fondling the silver wire and came over to ask if I needed help. I showed her my list. "16 gauge silver sheet? That's really heavy - and expensive. Let me show you the price." Ouch. The list said to bring a minimum of 2" x 6". I decided to splurge and went for 3" x 6" which cost $99.19! Yowza.

She went off to cut the silver. I picked up the sheet of 18 gauge copper I also needed and then started looking at chains, which wasn't an item on the list but I always need more chain. When she brought back the silver I hadn't quite decided which chains I wanted so she went off. Big mistake on my part. Once I was ready with my chain choices I waited another 10 minutes, which of course felt like 30, for someone to help me. Finally happened. With the addition of the files (a set of 12 skinnies), some silver sheet solder, and 2 dozen 4/0 saw blades, I was ready to check out. With tax, the grand total was ... $215.75. It strikes me that I may not be charging enough for my jewelry...

With metal in hand I walked out and turned left into...the Metalliferous bead and gem store! It was a total surprise and they had some lovely things, including blue chalcedony briolettes that are really translucent, like the one I used in this piece. This one I bought as a single piece at our local bead shop. When I ordered chalcedony briolettes from one of my usual sources, they were pretty, but not this translucent. The almost look like blue lace agate, which is beautiful, but not what I wanted. Now I have a whole strand of briolettes like these. They'll be showing up in jewelry soon. I got out of there without doing too much more damage and hiked back to Penn Station, where I just managed to catch a train home.

And what did I find waiting for me on the front step? A nice big package of beads and stones that I'd ordered last week. It's like I won the lottery or hit the jackpot! Yesterday I was nervous about jewelry camp. Today I'm all, "bring it on!" Retail therapy is the best kind: not only do I end up feeling better, I have excellent stuff to play with afterwards. Excuse me while I go gloat over my new silver and beads.

Pod Story

I'd like to introduce you to the Pod pendant. It's a new addition to my Etsy store and the story of its creation is quite a saga. It all started when I was browsing the PMCSupply.com website and found this stuff called Hattie's Bloom Mesh. It said that you could push a ball of pmc through it and fire it with the mesh in place to make these sort of bud-like protrusions. Always a sucker for a new product, I bought some and tried it out on two balls of pmc. The product worked as promised and now I had two lumps of silver protrusions.

What to do with them? I played around with them for days and they never seemed to fit anywhere. I decided that I should try to create a pmc base for the smaller lump. I put it on a flat oval pmc base -- again, the problem was how to make the two look like they belonged together. I added small balls of pmc, slightly smushed and then squeezed in a bezel cup. The result still looked incomplete, even after I set an iolite cabochon in the bezel cup. There were a couple of bare places in the lump that bothered me, so I glued in a Swarovski crystal (at the bottom) and the ends of some oxidized silver head pins (in the middle of the lump). Why did I glue instead of solder? I was in the "I can't make anything stick together with solder" phase and was sick of trying. Also, I had just used a dab of epoxy on the base of the cabochon, so the glue was handy.

Next phase in the life of the pod: I pried the crystal off and drilled a hole in the bottom, thinking I would dangle a pearl. Awful. After a few more days I thought, "It looks like the inside of something. It needs an outside." So I added the wire coil, which has its ends secured through the two drilled holes. Better! Then I decided to add a curved piece of heavy square wire to the other side to balance the coil. This time, I thought, I'm going to solder the sucker on.

With great care, I prepared the surface of the pod and the wire. With even more care, I used my two-clamp third hand to position the wire and pod tight against each other. I started up my little butane torch and very carefully started warming the metal around the pieces of solder. Suddenly the pod was engulfed in three inch high flames! I jumped back. I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed that olympic quality backward leap. I wondered if I should grab the fire extinguisher. By that time the flames had died down. The solder was gone, the clamps on the third hand were discolored, and the pod, oh my, the pod was black wherever the epoxy (the cause of the conflagration) had been. Not a nice patinated oxidized black, a greasy looking permanent horrible-looking black. And worst of all, the iolite was completely black.

After a suitable period of mourning had passed, I decided that soldering the wire onto the pod was still a good exercise, so I set it up again. This time I turned the pod upside down in the third hand, thinking it would let me see what was happening with the solder more clearly. I set everything up and applied the torch from underneath. After several tries the pod and wire remained unattached, so I decided it was time to call it a day. I took the pod out of the clamps and, lo and behold!, the nasty black gunk was all gone and the iolite was purple again. What heat taketh away, heat also giveth back. I decided it was a sign that the pod was just fine without any additional wire on the side and oxidized it on the spot.

There ends the story of the pod.

Soldering peaches

In the past week I've made great strides in my soldering skills. You won't think so when you see the pictures, but trust me, the fact that I could get two pieces of silver to stick together at all constitutes a great stride. A few days ago I set aside several hours and a pile of wire to practice soldering. I discovered several things:

• Sheet solder works for me, paste doesn't.
• I was using flux all wrong.
• A third hand (not an actual one, one of those contraptions) is extremely useful, maybe even crucial.
• My hands shake.

That last thing is why the third hand is so crucial for me. It's also making me extremely nervous, as in "I'm extremely worried that I have a degenerative disease of the nervous system." I don't, but what's life without a little hypochondria?

So, here's the first "piece" - and I use that term very loosely - I made during my soldering practice session. The pieces of wire were left over from a setting I tried to make for a drusy. I chopped them up and laid them out until they took on this basket shape. Then I soldered them together and added a hook. (It helps me feel less pointless to believe that I'm actually making something.) I doubt I'll ever do anything with this, besides gaze on it proudly from time to time.

The next thing I did was to attempt to make two different adinkra motifs out of soldered wire. I chose me ware wo "I will marry you" (which is the symbol to the right) and odo nnyew fie kwan "love never loses its way home" because a friend wants me to make her a necklace using those two symbols and a couple of others. I've made a couple of adinkra symbols out of pmc, but these two seem more suited to wire work. It took hours, but I managed to produce what I'm thinking of as first drafts of the symbols. (I don't have a picture of odo yet, but I'll post one later.)

You can click on the picture at left to see a larger size of the me ware wo pendant, which will allow you to admire my mad soldering skills. Actually, what you'll see is that this one is blobbier than the first practice piece. The reason is that there are so many joins so close together. Still, it hasn't fallen apart yet, so I'm pretty happy.

To cap off a very satisfactory afternoon of soldering, I took a scrap of square 16 gauge silver wire and created....a tiny peach! And, yes, there is actual soldering involved here - the stem is attached to the body with the teensiest bit of nearly invisible solder. I was, as the Brits say, chuffed. So it was with renewed confidence that, a couple of days later, I picked up my torch and tried to make a soldered ring. Forty minutes later had a solder-covered mass of crooked wire - not the design goal I had in mind - so clearly more soldering practice is in order. Still, the very fact that I can think of myself as someone learning to solder, as opposed to someone who can't solder is nice. And I can always look at my soldered peach if I start to think that I can't actually do this %&#!&@! thing.

Paris Mystery pendant

This piece recently sold, so I'm "archiving" the description here.
----------------------
My first trip to Paris - I couldn't believe I'd finally made it. One afternoon on the Metro I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and looked into the greenest eyes I'd ever seen on a human being. "N'oubliez pas votre parapluie." "What? I'm sorry I don't speak.." At that moment the train lurched into the station and I almost fell to my knees. By the time I collected myself, I was alone in the car. That night I found a key in my pocket with a tag that said "4 Ropon 88-233"...

The pendant is fine silver (99.9%), oxidized to an antique bronze finish. It's 1 inch tall and hangs from a 17 inch gunmetal chain that closes with a lobster clasp.

Childhood dream, take 3

Fairly soon after I started working with PMC, I bought a Paragon Quick Fire kiln. There was a less expensive option, but when I read that the Quick Fire can also be used to enamel metal and fuse glass, I was sold. Ever since I saw pictures of copper enameling in a crafts encyclopedia when I was around 9, I've wanted to try it. I still remember clearly the piece that illustrated the article: it was a largish round pendant that had been covered with a layer of enamel and then had a lump and two threads added to make a design like this. Very 60s astro modern. The idea that you could actually take glass that was powdered or in thin threads or lumps and melt it to metal blew me away. This was glass like I'd never thought of it before and the process seemed somehow occult. I kept my fascination with enameling but never took a course and never tried it. Now, the Quick Fire promised to make all those childhood dreams come true, and more! Not only could I fire my pmc pieces, I could enamel them and even make fused glass pendants to go with them! I could turn out amazing multi-media art jewelry made completely from components that I had created, even down to the jump rings! (Never mind that I haven't actually started making my own jump rings in spite of the fact that I have a saw. It just seems so fiddly.) I was sold.

In retrospect, I think I was a little overly optimistic. Let me tell you something: enameling is not easy. There's some serious chemistry and physics going on in this process and, in spite of having several books to consult, I have not yet become one with the process. At first I couldn't get the powder to come out of the sifter at all. The books always show people doing it with this elegant one-handed tapping motion. All I managed to do was give myself a hand cramp. So I put the piece down to coat it and used two hands (something you're not supposed to do since then you have to somehow pick it up without disturbing the enamel powder). Naturally, when I tried to pick it up, I disturbed the enamel powder and had to re-coat the piece. Figuring out how hot and how long to fire the pieces should have been easy: every book has loads of charts. It wasn't. The first pieces I tried out had a variety of problems: uneven coating, pulling away from the edge, weird texture from being over-fired (or possibly under-fired). And sometimes the enamel just popped right off the metal as it cooled. (Note on the red piece my failed attempt to recreate that childhood memory.) I realized that I wasn't going to be making an fancy enamel jewelry anytime soon, so I put the supplies away and decided to focus on the work with pmc.

A couple of months later I was working with the pinch form in pmc: what you get when you pinch a ball of clay between the thumb and forefinger of both hands at the same time. (The necklace to the right has three pinches that I drilled and strung directly onto a wire cable. One is heavily oxidized, the other two are highly polished.) I fused several small ones together and liked the shape, but there was a hole in the middle that needed something. Then I remembered the container full of glass lumps packed away with all the other enameling supplies. I got them out, fired up the kiln, and stuck a chunk of blue glass into the middle of the cluster of pinches. I heated it just until the glass balled up, not long enough for it to spread out flat. It worked! The light shines through the back of the form so the blue glass looks positively illuminated. I've worn it a few times and fiddled with it a lot and the glass still hasn't fallen off. (The color of the silver in the picture is wrong - it's not actually brown. The color of the blue is right though.)

Not wanting to stretch my luck, I let another couple of months go by before trying enamel again. That was this morning. This time I had a couple of pieces that I'd created from scraps particularly to use with enamel. One is a little cup that I filled with large chunks of transparent red glass. The other is the oval pendant with blue and green swirls. As you can see, I'm still not making beautiful enamel jewelry, but I'm getting the hang of how hot and how long to fire the pieces. I'm definitely having better luck with enamel on fine silver than enamel on copper though. Just to see if I could do it, I tried enameling a blank oval copper pendant. I put a layer of clear enamel over the copper and added just a couple of chunks of green glass in different shades. It was quite pretty - except for the part where the enamel popped off the metal as it cooled. It doesn't matter. The Quick Fire kiln is amortizing rapidly and my childhood dream of enameling on copper is just around the corner. Really.

Ragged Heart pendant

Sold 4/25/07.

I'm not a big fan of heart jewelry. I'm a sentimental fool, a complete romantic, a total sucker for baby animals - but I don't like heart jewelry. So, I was bashing a silver nugget with my trusty hammer the other day and imagine my surprise when I looked at it and saw...a ragged heart. And I realized that what I dislike about so much heart jewelry is that the hearts are all perfect and shiny, with lots of swoops and curls. Whose heart looks like that? Not mine. My heart is sturdy, tough, with lots of scars and wrinkles. It's been around the block and got dragged into some back alleys, but it always emerges stronger. And I imagine it looks kind of like this pendant. Maybe you can relate.

The one-half inch pendant is made of lightly oxidized fine silver (99.9%) and, with its companion rhodonite briolette, hangs from an 18" sterling silver snake chain with toggle clasp, both heavily oxidized for contrast.