Bead Show Blues

The bead show was a great disappointment. I thought it would be full of suppliers and instead it was full of what seemed like local bead shops. Maybe big local bead shops, but nonetheless. Lots of dyed freshwater pearls of low to middling quality. Lots of stone bead strands, very few of which were at all interesting. Lots of Swarovski crystal - not that I have anything against it, I sometimes use it, but you can find it everywhere. There were only a couple of dealers who had cabs and only one had cabs worth buying, though even they weren't anything really special. Nevertheless I found a few things to take home.

My favorite stone, right now at least, is blue chalcedony and I especially love a blue chalcedony druzy. I picked up a quite nice strand of good sized ones, some botryoidal, that will make excellent pendants.







I also bought several other strands: striped agate teardrop beads
teeny 1-1.5mm peachy pearls, small 3mm silver grey pearls, small labradorite teardrops - these I'm going to use as chain substitutes for some of my silver pendants









five different kinds of vintage lucite beads - I have a retro streak that doesn't really fit with the style of jewelry I'm making now and that no one else seems to be interested in because every retro piece I've made has failed to sell - but why let that stop me?
four very small cabs: three white opal and one pink tourmaline - opal is my birthstone and these not very flashy ones remind me of a pendant I had as a child








and a hank of silk cords - scrumptious colors.







Grand total? My lips are sealed.


There's one other thing I bought that I'm really excited about: a Paraiba tourmaline crystal that hasn't been polished. It's pink and blue and frosty and absolutely gorgeous. It also cost way too much and is responsible for putting me over my self-imposed spending limit for the show. These pictures don't really show how luminous it is.

Maybe this is just buyer's remorse (not an a usual affliction for me) but, I've been reading a little about Paraiba tourmalines in the couple of hours since buying it and I'm starting to think that it might not actually be one. It looks suspiciously like this regular tourmaline.

(This picture is in the public domain and comes from Wikipedia and you can see it in context here.) True, this one's not frosty, but that might just mean it's been polished. However, the non-pink areas on mine are more blue than green and Paraiba tourmalines are known for being more blue than green, so I'm not going to worry about it. My new tourmaline is a beautiful piece of rock and I've already started sketching ideas for how to use it - another example of "love the stuff".

Crazy for stones

Auctions on Ebay used to annoy me. Do I have time to sit around waiting for the time to run down with my finger poised on the "bid" button? No. But so many of the good stones on Ebay are sold via auctions and the "Buy it now" stones never seem like that much of a bargain. That's all changed now and the tipping point happened in Greece. We were in one of the many jewelry stores we investigated there and K admired a necklace that consisted of a black druzy on a silver cable choker. Totally simple and shockingly expensive. I said, "Don't buy it - I can make it for you, easy." Give a girl a few days in jewelry camp and she thinks she can do anything.

The first step, obviously, was finding a nice black druzy. The one we saw had a druzy pocket in a smooth, shiny black oval, like the one in the picture below (which is a spoiler since now you know that I did find such a stone, but this is a blog, not a mystery). I checked all my usual stone sources and discovered only a couple and they were too expensive. So I checked out Ebay. There they were - lots of them and beautiful ones. Trouble was, they were all being sold via auctions. Quelle drag!

Then I discovered AuctionSniper, one of the many programs that bid for you. It offered three free "snipes", so I gave it a try. I won three stones for roughly half what I thought they'd cost if I bought them through a regular online store. These two are my favorites. They're from a seller call aroc55, who mainly seems to sell slabs. Now I have the black druzy -- all I need to do is figure out how to get it onto a cable with no visible setting showing. I can't recall if the one in Greece was drilled or what, but this one isn't so I'll have to be creative. The other agate druzy is my favorite though - great translucence in the surrounding stone and the druzy really sparkles, but not so much as to look artificial, which I think is a problem with some of the coated druzies.

The third stone is a pyrite druzy that's a beautiful gold color with rainbow highlights. (And, yes, I do have a thing for druzies. It all started when K gave me a gorgeous druzy ring for Christmas. I had never seen one before and it seemed like a magical stone.) It's a beautiful stone, but I had a hard time figuring out how to set it since the height varies a lot from one part of the stone to another. Also, it just didn't look good next to silver, not even oxidized silver. I'm not ready to shell out the money for gold at this point so it seemed like brass was the answer. Fortunately I had some brass sheet left over from jewelry camp and this is what I came up with. I'm pretty happy with the design, but I need to remake it because the metal got pretty marred while I was playing around with it. One thing I learned making this is that sketching really only works for me as a way of keeping track of ideas. When I'm in the throes of working out a design it's much more useful to make models of stiff paper.

Shopping success is a great convincer so I signed up with AuctionSniper and went a little crazy. I bought a nice apricot druzy, two matched druzies that look like little geodes, four chalcedony cabs, a ruby cab, and two druzy pendants. The apricot druzy, also from aroc55, is great - good size, good color, nice even height. The little geodes are very cool, but I was so smitten with the picture I neglected to notice how teensy they are. The size was right there in the description but the beautiful macro shot was so mesmerizing I missed it. Also, they're quite round in the back, which means they'll be difficult to set, and the backs are also very cracked and unstable looking, so they can't be used without a setting that covers the entire back. The chalcedony cabs could be chalcedony, but they're dyed such a violent blue that they could be anything. Fortunately, they only cost me $4.01, of which $3.95 was postage. The ruby cab arrived today and looks ok, except that I think it has a bubble in it. Do real rubies have bubbles? The last two druzy pendants haven't arrived yet - they're coming from Brazil. I hope they aren't a disappointment.

Things were clearly getting out of hand. At one point I had 16 snipes waiting to happen. After the tiny geodes and chalcedony cabs arrived on the same day, I canceled all my outstanding snipes and tried to get a grip. That was three days ago and so far I'm still on the straight and narrow. There have been a couple of close calls, like yesterday when I decided I had to have some plume agate and sniped six listings before I could stop myself. They've all been deleted though. Staying on the wagon is difficult but knowing that I'm going to a bead show tomorrow, where there will be lots of people selling beautiful stones, helps a lot.

How much is a necklace worth?

My friends have been telling me that my prices are too low. Over the past few months I've gradually raised my prices from the the $20-$30 range to the $40-$60, which I thought was pretty ballsy of me. Then I did some looking around and was startled to find pieces similar to mine going for hundreds of dollars. Not that the people charging those prices are out of line - it just made me wonder, where does the value in a piece of jewelry come from?

Right, this isn't neuroscience - there are standard formulas out there for pricing jewelry and all of them are some version of cost of the materials + overhead + hourly wage for the artist. So the difference between a $40 pendant, like the one on the right, and a $315 pendant should come down to things like the quality of the materials used, how long each took to make, differences in overhead, and the wage each artist pays herself.

Let's break it down for these two necklaces. Both are made of sterling silver and fine silver (PMC) - the prices for those materials are fixed by the silver market so the only really substantial variation is going to come from quantity. My pendant is smaller, about half the size of the other one. The freshwater pearl is definitely a less expensive embellishment than the fossilized wood - hard to tell by how much. Let's say the raw materials for the other necklace cost twice as much as the raw materials for mine.

Hourly wage for the artist is is much trickier - and not just because people work at different speeds or pay themselves differently wages. Do you count just the time you actually spend working on this very piece or do you count the hours you spent coming up with the design and refining it? What about time spent sketching? or buying materials? (or is that overhead?) It only took me about an hour to make my pendant - but there were many other hours spent trying to figure out how to work with PMC, trying out different shapes to get the curves I wanted, texturing and re-texturing, etc. I don't figure that into the selling price - maybe the other artist does. As for overhead, let's assume we both added in about 10% of the base price.

Working through this makes me think I did undercharge for my pendant - the price should've been more like $60. That's still a long way from $315. So where does the other $255 of value come from?

It could be quality of workmanship: I'm still a beginner and there are lots of things I do that could be improved. For example, the back of my pendant isn't finished very well - it's reasonably smooth, but that's it. I've seen pendants with lovely patterns, design elements, or artist marks on the back -- all of which make the jewelry look much more professional.

It could be that the other artist pays herself a significantly higher hourly wage. I could try doing that, but would anyone buy my jewelry then? Now we're getting to the real issue: what will the market bear? Do you have a product that people are willing to pay a premium for? Clearly the other artist does and, just as important, she's found the people who are willing to pay the premium. And you know what that means, don't you? Promotion, marketing - my twin nemeses. I can work on my jewelry-making chops all I want, but if no one knows about it, my prices are going to languish in the middle two figures. Is doubling, or even tripling, the price of my jewelry worth the extra marketing and promotion I'd have to do to make it salable at that price range? Does the extra income balance the time and mental anguish of getting out there and selling? Honestly, I don't know.

Of torches and lemonade

On the torch front, yesterday I went to Home Depot and bought a MAPP gas + oxygen torch, mostly because the tanks were in a handy package with the hose and torch and striker -- and it didn't cost too much. I've never heard of MAPP gas much less worked with it. The good news is that it's way hot enough for everything I wanted to do. Much silver has been reticulated this afternoon, to my great satisfaction. On the downside, it's a two-tank deal, which is a bit of a pain. Even more of a down-side, when the gas is burning without oxygen it produces this extremely sooty smoke. It stops once you add sufficient oxygen, but yech. All the spiderwebs on my kitchen ceiling, which had previously been invisible, are now black. I'm trying to think of it as the decorating equivalent of liver of sulfur.

Here are some other pieces I finished at Peters Valley. All the bracelets are sterling silver. The first two were run through a corrugator before being formed with a mold in a hydraulic press. Of the nine pieces I made at PV, I think these are my favorites. The corrugation makes the silver look like it's ruffled, especially in the white bracelet. The patina on the other one blew me away - I've never gotten that many colors from liver of sulfur. As far as I know, it was just LoS in water - but the teacher kept it pre-mixed in a brown glass jar and we brushed it on cold. I've read a bunch of books on jewelry-making in the past year and many of them had "recipes" for using LoS, but none of them recommended keeping it in liquid form. I haven't tried it since I got home, but if this is the kind of patina cold application gives, I'm for it.

For the third bracelet, I fused silver wire to the silver sheet and then ran it through the rolling mill to flatten the wire before molding. The patina on this one isn't as striking - I think it's because this wasn't polished to a high shine like the other one. Finally, this pendant is the last thing I finished at jewelry camp. The stone is a quartz doublet: two layers of quartz with a thin layer of rose gold between. This started out as a way to salvage a mistake. I had domed the pac-man shaped circle, then decided I didn't like it and hammered it flat, which erased most of the texture and made it slightly lopsided. I put it aside and made another one for the piece I was working on. Later I was looking at the pieces I had left over and started playing with some bits of wire and the lopsided pac-man. Something about the arrangement clicked and, with a little extra texturing using a chasing tool, I had a new pendant -- which I actually like better than the original piece I had been trying to make when I made the mistake.

So the lesson for today is "Carry a big torch and make lemonade." Or something like that.

Size does matter

This afternoon I gathered up the pieces for several soldering tasks and headed off to the kitchen to assemble my small soldering station. Got out the ceramic board, the charcoal brick, the crappy flux (source of many of my soldering woes - better stuff is on order), assorted tweezers and picks, and set up the pickle pot (a tiny slow cooker). Oh yeah, and I got out my little butane "torch". It worked fine for soldering ends onto chain and soldering bezel wire closed and even sweat soldering a tiny peach onto some textured silver I brought home with me. Then I tried to remove a part I had soldered onto some copper incorrectly and, because I used hard solder originally, it took ages. Only slightly daunted, I tried to ball the ends of some heavy wire... and tried and tried. Total failure. The ends of the wire look a little mushy, that's it. Finally, I pulled over a stool, sat down, and decided to finish texturing a piece of silver I'd started reticulating at PV. I held the torch on that sucker for a good three minutes and only managed to get the thinnest corner red-hot, which isn't hot enough. Feh.

You know what this means, right? I have to buy a bigger torch. Normally, I would celebrate the opportunity to buy more tools, but a torch presents some problems. My studio is on the third floor, but I solder in the kitchen (first floor) because I like the fact that there are fire-proof surfaces to work on and a killer vent over the stove to deal with fumes. That's where I run the kiln for PMC and enameling, too. I don't really like the idea of having a tank of acetylene or propane on the third floor in what is essentially a spare bedroom. (No bed anymore, just acres of jewelry-making supplies.) Rick Marshall said it's actually illegal to have acetylene in the house. So what do I do? The garage is a shell with no electricity, so that's not an option. The basement is damp, moldy, and stinky, so that's definitely not an option. Time for some research. In the meanwhile, it's little tiny bits of easy solder for me. Feh.

So you wanna go to jewelry camp....

Some folks have been asking how I found out about Peters Valley and if I know of any other jewelry camp opportunities. I read about PV on the ArtJewelry site. The link takes you straight to their page on schools and workshops. Here's a list of schools from Metalwerx, another very useful site:

• Brookfield Craft Center, located in southwestern Connecticut, strives to support creativity, fine design, and quality craftsmanship through a wide variety of educational and retail programs.
• Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• DeCordova Museum School, Lincoln, Massachusetts
• Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine
• Massachusetts College of Art, a public, free-standing college of art and design in Boston, Massachusetts
• New Approach School, provides visual-intensive, hands-on jewelry repair and fabrication training in Virginia Beach, Virginia
• Penland School of Crafts, a national center for craft education located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina
• Peters Valley Craft Education Center, Layton, New Jersey, a nationally recognized education center for fine craft located in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
• Rhode Island School of Design, a private, co-educational college in Providence, Rhode Island
• Revere Academy of Jewelry Arts, offers short classes and diploma programs on jewelry making as well as jewelry books and videos by Alan Revere
• School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
• Workshops at Wolf Designs, offers jewelry and metalsmithing workshops using macro-videotechnology, in Portland, Maine

Finally, you should call your local arts council or YMCA/YWCA - such places often give jewelry-making workshops in the summer, and even if they don't, they will often know of local resources. And don't forget to check your local bead store!

If anyone reading this knows of other places to find info on jewelry-making workshops, please add it in the comments. I'll try to set up a more visible location for the information.

Jewelry Camp, part two

For those of you who read yesterday's post to the end, yes, I saw a bear! It looked like a sort of pre-teen black bear, maybe 4 ft tall standing up. It was hanging out in the middle of the road to Thunder Mountain, where the workshop is located. The moment I saw it I realized why all the handouts they give you stress that (a) you shouldn't try to pet the young bears and (b) you shouldn't turn and run when you meet a bear. On seeing the bear my first two, almost simultaneous, thoughts were "So cute! Must pet!" and "Ohmigod, big mother bear - run!" It reminded me of the time I was on a whale-watching boat off Cape Cod. On the way out to the watching area the tour leader kept saying "When we see the whales, don't stand on the benches." Over and over. Then when we saw the first whale, everyone instantly jumped up on the benches, including me! It was like a reflex. Same with the bear. Fortunately, I was behind the wheel of my car and did neither. The bear scampered off and I drove on, feeling that I'd just had a rather surreal, maybe even mystical, experience. By the way, the picture is of some mosaic sculptures in the meadow outside the Fine Metals studio.

The students in the workshop were a pretty mixed group, though not so much in terms of gender. We were 11 women and one lone man. Professions were diverse: two professors, two graphic designers, a couple of students, a geologist, a sculptor, and some others I've forgotten. Most of us were middle-aged. All of us had enough disposable income to afford the tuition -- except the two students, who were there on the equivalent of work-study. (If you can't afford the tuition, this is a great deal.) I was about to say that I got to know a few of the other participants, but, oddly, that's not really true. Though I worked in the same rooms with them for five days and shared many meals with various combinations of them, our chit-chat was almost always about the workshop: what was working, what wasn't, what we liked, what we didn't like, how awful the accommodations were (after all, most of us were middle-aged, middle class ladies!), how annoyed we were with Rick, how much we adored his assistant, Aalia, etc. One of the participants was another Etsy seller, buttoncollective, who makes these fun storyboards for your button collections. (You don't have a button collection? Time to get started: stilettoheights, decayingindustries, belleandboo, and lots of other sellers on Etsy.)

By the time we'd finished with our hearts we'd learned how to saw (in spite of breaking saw blades every few minutes), how to use the rolling mill, how to make 3D forms using the hydraulic press, how to solder (sort of), and how to use the drill press. And we were only midway through day 2! I used some of my newfound skills on some brass that I'd brought with me and created this ring. The thing I like best about it is that the seam is soldered almost invisibly - proof that I've been bitten by the metalsmithing bug. It's no accident that it looks vaguely like Beth Piver's work - I own one of her rings and love it.

Around this time Rick did a demo using a flexshaft machine. (Can't wait till mine arrives!) While demonstrating the use of a separating disk (aka cutoff wheel), he ran it over the back of a piece of copper a couple of times in an arc shape and then easily bent the copper into a beautiful complex curve. I loved it - that kind of simple yet complicated geometric form is right up my alley. So I immediately tried the same thing on a piece of much heavier copper that I had already patterned and cut out. After bending it, which wasn't easy because I hadn't really cut deeply enough in some places, I ran a line of solder down the inside of the bend to support it. Then I drilled two angled holes and inserted a piece of very narrow sterling silver tubing. Much later, after I felt my soldering skills had improved enough, I added a jump ring to the end of the tubing. Eventually I'll put this on a silver chain and the tubing, which fits very snugly into the copper, will act as the clasp. (Thanks to Aalia for that suggestion.) This is the first piece I made at the workshop that I really like. I'm thinking of doing something similar using sterling silver for the body of the piece.

It was around the middle of the third day that I stopped flinching every time I had to light a torch. The torches in the soldering room were real ones, not the little butane-fueled creme brulee torch I have at home, which is basically an over-sized lighter. The flame on these babies was, at its smallest, about four times the size of the largest flame my little guy can muster. Most of us spent the first day completely flummoxed by Rick's repeated instruction to heat the piece, not the solder! since the flame seemed so huge it totally engulfed everything. We also spent the first day or two jumping like scared rabbits every time anyone lit a torch: hissss + loud pop + flame = flight response. Last night I realized I hadn't played with fire and hot metal for 36 hours and I missed it: missed the smell of burning flux, the over-heated, poorly lit soldering room, the hiss of the hydraulic press. But the things I miss most are having the time and mental space to focus intently on learning something new, the highly structured schedule within which our creativity was allowed (almost) free reign, and the experience of being pushed out of my comfort zone. How can I recreate that experience back home, with all the pressures and distractions of everyday life? Sadly, it's not just about buying a lot of new equipment -- it's about finding the discipline to focus and to push myself without the support of an externally imposed schedule and set of assignments. But that's what it's always been about, isn't it?

More to come. Here's a preview of some of the other work I did at jewelry camp.

Out of the jewelry bubble

Last night I returned home from five days at the Peters Valley Craft Center but it feels like I've been gone for much longer. It was a transformative experience, not least because, for five days, I was totally focused on one thing. I don't think I've experienced that kind of exhilarating all-consuming engagement since grad school. Here's how the days went: breakfast from 7-8:30, class from 9-12, lunch from 12-1, class from 1 or 1:30 to 5:30, dinner from 6-7:30, class from 7:30-10. Turns out that "jewelry camp" is exactly what it was.

The setting is incredibly beautiful and very isolated: the nearest Starbucks is 25 miles away. (Fortunately, the kitchen made excellent coffee.) The accommodations are, shall we say, somewhat rustic. It wasn't so much the yard sale collection of seen-better-days furniture that bothered me, or even the violently green velour bedspreads apparently made out of polyethylene, or the can of flying insect spray thoughtfully provided in each room. The worst thing was that the bathrooms had signs in them warning you not to drink the water, but saying that it was ok to use it to brush your teeth! Kinda creepy. However, the food was good, the people were interesting, and the workshop was, ultimately, thrilling.

The class started with a morning of technique demos performed by Rick Marshall, the workshop teacher and head of Fine Metals at Peters Valley. He then set us the task of making a two-sided puffed heart pendant out of copper with one small heart applied to the surface and another cut out. I think we all panicked at that point - it seemed like an impossible task. With lots of support from Rick and his fantastic assistant, Aalia, we all managed to finish our hearts (except for the one woman who bailed before lunch the first day). My first heart is on the left. About 30% of the front surface is actually covered with solder - patina hides a multitude of sins, including wayward solder. I also managed to smush a big thumbprint into the front of the heart while sanding it. The second heart I started right after finishing the first one - I was intent on making one that looked cleaner. It took much less time and only about 20% of the front is covered with solder. Progress!

The puffed hearts were made with a hydraulic press -- basically a powerful jack, like they have in garages, attached to a frame. An incredibly useful tool and one (among many) I now feel that I cannot live without. Here's the very press that I used in making these hearts and several other pieces of jewelry. And here's a picture of my workbench. Note that it's incredibly messy and that I've snagged one of the flex-shaft machines available for student use. I was determined to do three things at this workshop: learn to solder, learn how to set a cabochon stone, and figure out if it was worthwhile to replace my Dremel with a real flexshaft machine. The answer to that question is a resounding Yes! In fact, I ordered the economy model from Contenti today. According to Rick, this model is perfectly good for the beginning jeweler, especially if you splurge on a Lucas foot control to replace the control that comes with it - which, of course, I did.

Sorry for all the technical jargoneering -- part of the experience was a total immersion in the language and techniques of metalsmithing for jewelry and I haven't quite escaped the jewelry-making bubble. I took my laptop intending to keep a record for the blog while I was away, but the only time I wrote was after I arrived on the night before the workshop started. Once it began I pretty much didn't think of anything else for five days. Any free time I had was spent sketching, thinking about jewelry-making, looking at jewelry related books and magazines, or talking to other workshop participants, mostly about jewelry-making. Or taking quick cat-naps - the intensity of focus was exhausting. I ate three hearty meals a day, as if I were doing heavy physical labor (and, amazingly, didn't gain any weight). While there were a few things that required a significant amount of actual physical labor, most of the work was exhausting because it was so painstaking, and so damn little! (Note the jump ring soldered onto the first heart. It's only about 4mm wide. I attached it at some point later in the workshop and there's not a bit of extra solder around it - but it took ages to set up and execute.)

Clearly this is a story that's going to take a few days to tell. I'll close with a tally of wildlife sightings, since the wildlife, especially of the tick-ish variety, was one of my big concerns:

What I saw at Peters Valley:
Rabbits: 40-50 (I stopped counting around the mid-twenties, which was on the 3rd day)
Chipmunks: 12
Deer: 6
Wild turkeys: 2
Turtles: 1
Bears: 1
Ticks: 0

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.

Jewelry Camp

From Friday, June 15 through Tuesday, June 19 I will be away at....drumroll, please.....jewelry camp! No, they don't call it that, but it's how I've been thinking of the jewelry-making workshop at Peters Valley Craft Center. This place is out in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, meaning it's out in the woods. Normally this would be enough to put me off - I'm not a woods kind of gal. At all. Famously, at least among my friends, I once said to a hiking enthusiast, "So this hiking business - the idea is that you walk up the hill and then you walk down? That's it?" What could she say? "Uh, yeah, that's it...but it's really worth it!" Uh-huh. If that's the case, why is it that the stories you hear from hikers and climbers are always disaster stories?

"We had the most awesome weekend! We went hiking on Mt. Pointless and about halfway to the campsite we realized we'd forgotten all the tarps, but we went on anyway. Then Emma tripped and sprained her ankle so she had to give her pack to Kim and I helped her walk. Just as we got near the site these huge black clouds rolled in and the wind started to blow so hard we couldn't even set up the tent! Oh my god, we were so cold and wet! It was great!"

Fortunately it doesn't look like there's any obligatory hiking at jewelry camp, even though the studio is a short two-miles from the living/eating area. I'm bringing my car.

As if the ruralitude of the locale weren't enough of a trial, the list of things to bring contained this disturbing entry, complete with bold font for emphasis:

Insect repellent This season we are experiencing a high than normal amount [sic] of ticks and we suggest everyone bring repellent with them.

It gets better. Three lines down I read: "Flashlight with batteries, there are no streetlights here." Ok, so I'm going to be out in the middle of nowhere stumbling around in the dark with my ankles covered in fat ticks incubating a nice case of Lyme disease. This guy Frederick Marshall better be one hell of a teacher.

So why do I want to go to jewelry camp? When it comes to making jewelry I like to say that I've been raised by wolves. I've never taken a class - everything I know came from books and lots of trial and error. I'm sure there are easier, faster, more elegant ways of doing half the things I do on an almost daily basis. (Actually, that's probably true of a lot more than making jewelry.) And then there's soldering, my attempts at which fail around 90% of the time. I'd like to get it down to around a 50% failure rate by the end of the class. According to the brochure, we'll also learn to use "die forms with texture hammers and roller printing for surface design." And we'll bezel-set some cabochons. All of which sounds like heaven on a bun.

Nevertheless, it struck me last night that the real reason I'm going to jewelry camp is that I want to take a painting class. I've also been raised by wolves when it comes to painting and I'm starting to feel that I need outside eyes to look at my work and push me in new directions. I've been wanting to take a painting class for a couple of years, but it's difficult with work and, also, I've been scared. It's one thing to paint in the privacy of your home and show your work to friends and colleagues. It's quite another to put myself into a class in front of strangers, most of whom will no doubt be decades younger than I am, who have no reason to believe that I'm an artist of any kind. I'm getting a little nauseated at the thought even as I type this. Clearly, some healthy part of my psyche got annoyed with my lily-livered ego and said, "ok, if you're too much of a wimp to jump right into a painting class, start with something artistic that you don't have so many hang-ups about - like, say, jewelry."

The reason all this became so clear last night was because, for the first time, I actually got nervous about jewelry camp. I don't mean I got nervous about the ticks and lack of civilization (i.e., no Starbucks within walking distance). I got nervous about being a beginner in front of strangers. It's been a while since I've gone out on that particular limb and that's not a good thing. So, thanks for the push, hidden healthy part of my psyche, just don't expect me to go hiking.

Originality

People get their knickers in a twist all the time complaining about this or that person ripping off their designs. I was browsing Etsy and came across this little bit of wishful thinking: "I have designed my jewelry specifically to be unlike anything else out there. Please respect my wishes to keep my jewelry looking original & fresh by not copying my designs." I call it wishful thinking for two reasons: the obvious one is that someone intent on copying her design isn't going to be put off by her wishes. But it's also pretty naive to think that your designs really are unlike anything else in the marketplace. Truth is, there's very little that hasn't been done before, in any domain, and with thousands of people making and selling jewelry on-line, you're bound to find things that look similar to one another. (Speaking of the number of people making and selling jewelry these days, this piece from the Onion is priceless: 80% of U.S. Populace Now Selling Handmade Jewelry.)

No doubt there are people on Etsy and elsewhere who willfully and unscrupulously look at what's selling, reproduce it as closely as possible, and sell it at a lower price - but I think that a lot of the complaints people make about copying don't fall into that category. There are basic techniques that everyone making a certain type of jewelry uses and those techniques will result in a fair amount of similarity in designs. There are simple, classic motifs that recur, not just in the jewelry on Etsy and in brick-and-mortar stores, but over long periods of history. We're all subject to the influence of fashion to some degree, so suddenly we'll find ourselves really wanting to make something out of labradorite because it looks new and exciting. Next thing you know, loads of labradorite jewelry everywhere.

More importantly, all art, including jewelry-making, is a conversation with the art that has come before. If you think you aren't inspired by the work of other artists, then you are either walking around not looking at art or you are fooling yourself. Yes, you say, but inspiration isn't copying. True enough. Picasso said, "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." What I think he meant is that a good artist takes someone else's idea, image, or technique and absorbs it totally, making it their own. That sounds like inspiration to me. (When I posted this quote in an Etsy forum a few months ago the response was, and I quote, "Yuck.")

Saying "I try to be original" feels odd - I suppose I do, but it's not what I think about when I'm working. My focus when I'm working is to be in the moment with the materials as I pursue an elusive image. Where does the image come from? Usually I have no idea. Could it have come from some other person's piece of jewelry? Certainly - just as it might have come from a picture in a newspaper, a texture on a tree branch, a painting, or something someone said.

All that being said, there are some artists on Etsy whose work looks remarkably fresh to me. One is nanopod, a Canadian artist who makes beautifully crafted jewelry in bizarrely organic forms. The ring to the right is one of my favorite pieces - she calls it the Perelandrain Ring II. The other artist, LostandBound, is more mysterious. S/he just joined Etsy in early May and there's no info in the profile. The jewelry is amazing though -- sculptures really. I'm particularly fond of The Vogue, a choker that looks like it's made out of a railroad spike. Their materials, techniques, and styles are obviously quite different, but they're both quirky and a little strange. As you can tell from my weird organic things, I like strange.

That's really all I have to say about originality. No doubt it's all been said before.

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.

Love the Stuff

You gotta love the stuff or you won't love what you make out of it. I love silver - got a package of silver wire yesterday in all sorts of gauges and shapes and could barely restrain myself. Same with pmc and gemstones. Check out these drusies. I got them from Heart of Stone Studios a couple of days ago and can hardly take my eyes off them. I have no idea what to do with them -- setting stones isn't something I've learned to do yet -- but drusies are my new obsession. A drusy is a stone which is covered with a layer of tiny crystals. You know what the center of a geode looks like? That's drusy. Usually the color of the base stone determines the color of the drusy, but some are coated with a very thin layer of metal, which gives them a spectacular multi-color appearance. These are natural color drusies - seriously! The pink ones are cobalto calcite and the orange one is agate. I've also bought a couple of beautiful pale blue chalcedony drusies and a white quartz.

Starting a couple of months ago I tried making some things out of polymer clay, using both the regular colored type (I think I had a mix of Sculpey, Premol, and Fimo) and Sculpey 3. To me, the first batch of polyclay pieces looks like a bunch of cheap crappy plastic. I let a few weeks go by and then, inspired by the work of my friend at DC Designs, I tried making some swirly clay with translucent areas. These looked better as far as the clay itself went. The beads and pendants still look clunky and boring to me though. I found the Sculpey 3 more interesting, partly because it bakes to a ceramic-like hardness. Also, it's not colored so I painted the pieces and painting always makes me happy. Still, I'm left with a feeling of "eh". I know people do amazing things with polymer clay, but I am not likely to become one of those people because the stuff itself doesn't move me. If it doesn't move me as stuff, working with it becomes a mechanical process and the product reflects that.

On the other hand, working with pmc definitely moves me. (The way it dries out so quickly drives me nuts though - seriously, Mitsubishi, can't you work on that?) Trying to figure out what to do with the weird organic piece from the last post, I started messing around with polyclay. Nothing looked good - but after a couple of hours of messing with pieces of clay, a direction started to emerge, but it was clear it needed to be done in pmc, not polyclay. Then I remembered that I had ordered some of the sheet pmc that you can cut like paper and click click click - I knew what to do. Here's what it looks like at the moment, unfinished and unfired. Not as bizarre as I had initially hoped, but we'll see. There's always time to add more weirdness.

In search of Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig, the most recent James Bond, isn't what you'd call handsome. The Rolling Stone called him a "rugged, jug-eared Brit, whose irregular features improbably radiate a megawatt star charisma". My partner told me about a French phrase, belle-laide, which means "ugly beauty". That's Craig - it's a look I like, and not just in people.

Yesterday I wrote that the more I work with pmc the less I care about making pretty pieces. It's not that I don't care at all, but sometimes the process is more interesting, more compelling than the final product. So there are times when I have a decent looking piece of silver that could be turned into an acceptably pretty piece of jewelry, but I can't help but push it. I hammer it, torch it, twist it to see what happens. Recently I sold a necklace that I think is very much in the belle-laide category. When I listed it, I honestly didn't think anyone would buy it, though I quite liked it. The first thing my partner said when she saw it was "That's creepy." I named it the Xena pendant (as in Xena, Warrior Princess, a guilty pleasure), but at home we called it The Mouth of Doom. An acquaintance bought it the other night and when she tried it on I was really taken aback at how much better it looked on her than it did in the photographs or even on me. Some pieces of jewelry don't really show you what they are until they're worn by the right person.

Working this way is exciting -- you have to be willing to trust your instincts, take risks, and enjoy the outcome - even if it's not pretty. It also means that sometimes things go terribly wrong and instead of something pretty or even belle-laide, I end up with a bunch of truly ugly bits, like these. I've heard that some places will melt scrap into raw material, but some of these pieces are enameled or have non-silver wire fused into them, so I think that option is out. Perhaps I'll collect a few more of these plug uglies and make a charmless bracelet.

There's a piece I'm working on that's similar to the Xena pendant. It's a combination of heavy gauge sterling silver wire and fine silver and it's really been through the wringer. It's not finished and I've been puzzling about where to go with it for a couple of days. The frame and teeth are sterling silver wire, the organic looking center is pmc - it's sitting on a coiled, fused base of thinner gauge sterling silver wire. What I can't decide is whether to fill the area between the center and the frame with weirdly organic petals or pods or tentacles. And if yes, then what should they be made of? More pmc? pmc touched with gold? more sterling wire? polyclay in odd organic colors and shapes? chunks of enamel? paper? And do I cover up the coiled, fused backside or just let that be part of the design? In other words, how do I move this piece from creepy to Daniel Craig? So far I think I've achieved "rugged", "jug-eared", and "irregular". The question is, how do I get it to "radiate a megawatt star charisma"? Stay tuned.

Jewelry, painting, writing

The world doesn't need this blog. But I do. This is a public space that feels semi-private, a useful illusion.

Dear Diary,
Today I started a blog...

I started making jewelry just last year after I saw a bracelet in a jewelry store that cost around $200. It was a long narrow suede strip with tiny gold beads sewn all along it. You wrapped it around your wrist several times and it closed with a button and loop. Very simple. I went to the local bead store, bought some suede lacing and gold-foil lined beads for under $20 and made myself a lovely bracelet. Not as labor-intensive as the one in the store, but a nice effect. Then I made a few for friends. Soon bead lust set in and then tool lust and metal lust and now, less than a year later, I've bought many tools, a small kiln, a tumbler, and turned a spare bedroom into a jewelry studio. I don't live off painting or jewelry-making, which means that I can love it without requiring it to support my life. I love my other work, but these days my fingers itch and images of jewelry that wants to be made run constantly through my head. I want to be making - everything else is a distraction. So why am I writing this? I need to get meta with what I'm doing. Not usually a problem for a professional intellectual. When I paint, there's always a problem I'm working on, maybe technical, maybe conceptual, something I'm trying to "solve" with the work. Not so much with jewelry-making, though it's coming along.

Here's another reason for this blog: I have a store on Etsy and I've been surprised to discover that I love writing descriptions for my pieces. Sometimes they take the form of little story fragments - but when the piece is sold, the story disappears. So I'm going to post the stories with pictures of the pieces here, so that they can live on in active cyberspace.