Free Rider!!!

I love to take photos of my items outside.  I place the jewelry on sand, bricks, sandstone, gravel, plants... you name it.  I decided to place the earrings on some gravel and clicked away.  When I uploaded my photos, I saw this little free rider!  The tiny ant must have ran right across in a click.  Some of the ants got on me as well.  An occupational hazard of nature photography!

Some Finished Copper Pieces

Here are some photos of finished copper pieces!

Aluminum Casting Pour Up on the Roof

While we were busy working away on our relatively simple projects the other night, the guys next door were getting into much more serious business!  The door opened and one guy announced, "Five minutes to the aluminum pour..."  Well, that was our cue to grab our phones and cameras and take the outdoor walkway over to the rooftop patio behind the other metal studio.  Yep, they do real stuff over there like work on damascus, create multi-layer ingots called mokume gane and do some blacksmithing as well.  Think of it this way...  My projects are like Rhode Island and the stuff they do, well it's bigger than Texas!

They have their moulds set in sand with what looked like fireproof barriers in between each section.  The aluminum was put in a crucible and it was heated with a gas flame to a very high temp of about 1220 fahrenheit.  Yes, that's pretty hot...

Anyhow, the molten metal is in a crucible and it is carefully moved to a different type of metal holder and then it is poured into the various moulds.  The first pour didn't work out very well because they were using recycled aluminum from probably cans.  The second pour was done with a better quality of metal and it flowed very well.  Enjoy the photos and for many, it's not something you see every day or every night!

Copper and Some Other Things... On The Bench

Copper, steel wool, drill, etc...  What more can a person ask for!

In the works:  One large cuff bracelet, one cigar band ring and one bracelet section.  These items are made from the metal in the previous post.

Scraptastic!

This is more scrap copper I harvested at school.  The one larger piece will be made into a cuff bracelet.  I have some smaller pieces that will soon be cigar band rings and there is one other piece that will somehow make its way into a bracelet.  The milled leaves came out so nice on this one that I wanted to keep it close to this size.  I have some ideas about how this one will look with leather and some beads.  All of this metal needs to be shaped and formed.

The piece for the bracelet was really thick and small.  I milled and milled it in one direction to lengthen.  I had to anneal it once and then continued, milled more and annealed again.  For some reason today, the copper looked so great after taking it out of the acid bath.  It has the AB or aurora borealis look to it.  Very cool.  I almost want to keep it that way, but need to fully patina to get the fine lines of the leaves to show up.  Patinas are great right when they get on the metal.  If you start sanding or doing the slightest thing, they seem to change.  I do really like this look and may make some items in this process that show off more of the color than the fine detail.

Love... is a Colorful Four Letter Word

Back to the bookmarks...  First off, I continued to work on the patina last night.  I had layered some patina on there the day before, but it just looked dark and I wanted those great colors.  I call it the peacock look.  I lightly sanded the pieces, washed them, boiled some eggs and was getting ready to carefully put everything in the container when I decided to add something extra.  I crushed up three salt and vinegar chips to see if that would turn up the color to 11.  I had added actual vinegar and the chips before, but for some reason, the additional moisture in the container wasn't really working.  Wow, did the chips ever do it!  Thanks Lay's Stax!  You rock and well... stink, but did the trick.  Look at the photos and all the color range I got.  I will end up lightly removing some of that so the leaf imprints pop a bit more.  See the bird tracks in the second photo.  They like to hop on through the sand table out back and create some interesting art of their own.

This is kinda random, but I do some shows and there is one man who has bought a bracelet from me and has even ordered some special beads from me.  I'm still waiting for him to come back from the Carolinas to pick up those wrapped beads I've been saving for months.

Until then, there is his friend who almost always stops by at the shows to talk to me.  I found out both of the men are retired professors from a local university.  The one man comes over and talks to me, but I'm not sure he has ever bought anything from me and I'm working to change that!  He collects other things and at the last show, came over and showed me his recent purchase.

I believe he and his wife like to read.  Just the kind of people you can imagine reading a great book, thumbing through the pages and relaxing.  Yep, no Kindle readers here...  I'm talking about the real deal.   They seem to have a really interesting life.  He told me his wife is an artist and we talk about art.  She was recently on a plein air painting vacation on some island off the coast of Greece.  Nice...  I use to do stuff like that, but instead of heading over to the Mediterranean, I would pack it on out to the desert and paint the Superstition Mountains.  Um, yah... her trip sounded much more interesting!

I think the perfect gift for his wife would be one of my copper bookmarks and maybe at the next show, he'll pick one up!!!  I think she would LOVE one!   I'll keep you posted...

Origami on the Bench...

Alright, last night was another night at the studio of hammering, sawing, using the old torch and so on.  For some reason, I love to hammer away on those letter stamps for some added fun.  Poor gal next to me was trying to saw out some delicate curves through some sterling sheet and every so often "whack" came from my work space.  A noisy place it is!

What's interesting is that I decided to take some of my scrap metal and cut and shape the small pieces and use those for earrings.  I can send the rest of the tiny pieces off to the refinery.

I also have some copper pieces and you guessed it, those were rescued from the circular file.  Some people forge larger pieces and bowls and toss the scraps in a metal container.  What looks small to them is large for my needs.  I found the greatest piece of hammered and nearly destroyed copper with the most awesome patina on it.  I've been playing around with that and milled it and good grief, got some oil on it and after cleaning it off, some of the patina had changed.  Patina on copper can always change.  I have now cut that into strips and want to make a large cuff bracelet.

I've also milled and cut out some strips of copper for book marks.  They may be a bit too thick. but I didn't want them too thin and bendy...  Hey, who cares if you trash that old paperback, it's only gonna end up at Bookman's anyway.  I drilled a hole at the top and will slip some micro paracord through instead of ribbon.  The early patina on these pieces looked a bit dark.

We had a bit of a celebration last night and a few of us were lucky enough to be given these cute origami pieces!  There was a ring, a bear (look at the eyes) and the heart is mine.  So fun!

12 oz. Klean Kanteen Bottle Holder in 550 Coyote Paracord

This was a special order request from someone.  I used a quality US made 550 coyote paracord to make this bottle cover or koozie.  These bottles will keep a drink cold in ice for many hours.  These are vacuum insulated 18/8 stainless steele bottles.

The bottle cover is made out of one continuous piece of 550 paracord.  I have added an adjustable drawstring cord with black slider clip.  I also made a loop and knotted it, so you would be able to put a clip through it and hook it to your backpack or belt.  This is a really functional piece of survival gear as you will have well over 80 plus feet of cord in the event of an emergency.  Many like to carry extra cordage and this is a great way to do that.  It will never be tangled up in your pack!

I can make these in black and foliage as well.

Traditional Polish Embroidery

When I was a child, my grandmother had the greatest things like velvet slippers with all sorts of embroidery all over the tops with beautiful floss, sequins and beads.  There is something so beautiful to me, about the look of black velvet with all the shimmer on the surface.  The slippers she had worn were from Poland and the beauty of this look has stayed with me for all these years.

This type of embroidery was done on slippers and was a focal point of the traditional vests or corsets worn throughout the various regions of Poland.  I will post a couple of photos I had seen on-line.  The five and six petal floral motif is very popular as well as the images of sunflowers.

Another form of popular stitching or ornamentation would be cutwork.  This is where white fabric is sewn over with heavier white thread and the negative areas is then cut away with very sharp and pointed scissors.  This was used to decorate the edges or cuffs on shirts as well as the front sections.  Linens and pillow cases were decorated or made like this as well.  It's so beautiful and must have taken hours and hours to do this work.  The front of the blouse in the first photo has cutwork on the front.

A very traditional look would be a white embroidered long sleeve shirt, an embroidered velvet corset or vest and strands of coral beads have always been popular.  The strands of coral beads which many times were worn in three tiers, were cherished and handed down from generation to generation.  If a woman from what we called "The Old Country" had some of these, it was really something special.

The skirts were sometimes striped and longer in length.  There are over thirty different regions with a variety of traditional dress in Poland from what I've read.  Each region would use various and different fabrics and decorations for the clothing of men as well as women.  I believe the look of the garments in these photos would have been from the south and they are such beautiful works of art.