Polishing and Sanding

So got to cast my sea grapes, finally, and waiting to come nice and clean from the pickle. I noticed that I need to buy more rubber wheels for polishing. Still wondering if I should attach a small silver tube to the back of the pendant so that it can be hold in place when adding the ceramic parts in porcelain.

Fourth Spiculum

Working on my fourth spiculum got the copper cut out and rolled to the right gauges.  Now to file and saw to the shape I had as the spiculums before. Wondering if this should be a mixture of anticlastic and spiculum form. Hmmm.

Sea Grapes

Got my sea grapes cast, some of the holes for the prongs didn't come out so I have to drill them. The same with my bails on it. Trying to figure out how it will attach to my necklace.

Final Project

Finished my wax piece, got prongs set and sprue wax in place. Went to invest the piece and tested out if vacuum for the invest was working and it is not, glad I checked out first but sad that I have to wait till tomorrow morning. Ah, I do not like waiting, this sets me back a day. Still trying to figure out how to make the piece a pendant and link to a necklace in one.

Brooches

So for my brooch project I decided instead of using of making my forms into hydrolic dye forms I thought why not try a new technique and learn something new cause I love learning new techniques in jewelry and metalsmithing. So I decided to incorporate metalsmithing and jewelry together by making Spiculums, yay! Heh, any while looking at Kate's book on metal forms, I really like the different forms that you could create with just a flat sheet of metal, and I thought spiculums would work in my designs that I had.

In this project my inspiration was DNA, but not the DNA proteins but chromatin, and mitochondria. As a former Biology major, I enjoyed looking at plant cells and animal cells under a microscope, I found it quite interesting how tiny they looked but I was fascinated by them, and I wanted to learn more. Getting side tracked, short story I knew that I wanted to translate my passion of cell structures and forms into this brooch project, so I went with mitochondria and chromatin.

Below are some of my sketches that I made for the project and my beginning progress of the making spiculums =)

Above I started with 22G and went down to 26G in copper, boy was that a work out thinning them all out, made some extras just in case. =)

Sea Grapes Pendant

So as I was working on my sea grape pendant for short, I was looking at my initial design and decided that if I do plan on making this into a necklace with the sea grapes being just the only silver or bronze cast pieces that maybe the porcelain could have some silver or bronze like color glaze so it looks like it flowed from the silver or bronze piece and melted on to the rest of the necklace.

Any who here's some update pictures on my pendant.

Still waiting on my gems to get here, can't wait! =) Going to make it so that they are inside the sea grapes, so kind of like a light bulb I suppose. Happy Easter everyone! =)

Secondary drawings of Final Project

Okay, so I know for ceramics we have to do this final project and originally I wanted to either do jewelry or make a pitcher with four serving cups. But after looking up more and more ceramic jewelry I sort of decided to switch my idea back into jewelry out of clay. I am hoping that for my final project I can incorporate both, so that I still keep my initial idea for my jewelry class; but also so that I can make the pendant piece into part of the necklace for my ceramics class. So instead of making just one wax piece in jewelry, I might be making two - three. I'm still deciding what pieces of the necklace will be in silver/ or bronze and which will be in porcelain clay. Below are some of my sketches of the necklace piece I want to make for both of my classes. I'm very excited to see how it turns out, =).

Final Stages of Brooches

So, I noticed that my spiculums when hammering they began to spiral at first I thought it was because of the shape that I had decided to cut, but later I thought it might be the way I was hammering to create the form. Even though they got to spiral, I really like the effect, it made me think of the DNA spiral, which so I thought " hey!, it relates to what my reference so why not just got with it?" and so I did. Though the sample that Professor Nahabetian showed me all had a straight seem and later she told me it definitely was the way I was hammering, but I think I'll make more in the future so that I can get a straight seem and not a curvy one.

Any ways, here are my final stages of my brooches. I kind of have to make a fourth one so that there is a transition from the two last ones. And I have to fix the pins, I really really want to switch the pin from copper to brass but I am not sure yet.

Drawing of Final Project

My initial idea was to do a hair pin or a pendant. Below is the first sketch that came to mind, I feel like I need to add more or refine it more. I want to make this pendant out of silver, so currently I am trying to carve out of wax, though it seems to be quite difficult to make 1mm - 5mm size sea grapes by just carving them, so I was thinking of doing droplets of wax might work better then sanding them so they are not quite as rough, for the big ones, I'm trying to hollow them out. so that in the end they do not weigh as much.

Linkage and Metalsmithing work

Here's what the linkage project looks like as of now. The circular formation on the left is where it lays on the shoulder and it falls down to end slanted on the left side of the chest area. Still tapering wire for leaves stems, and branches though I feel that I could have used a thicker gauge wire than 18 G to start off with when linking the leaves together so it actually had more of a branch feel than a vine feel. Oh and on the right is my progress on the metalsmithing work. =)

Stages of Linkage Project

Progress on the linkage project.

Final Project Inspiration

Still trying to figure out what my final project will be. I was looking at aquatic plants and creatures and I found these that I thought were interesting. They are botryocladia pseudo dichotoma which for short they are sea grapes, halymenia, and gracilaria, I also wanted to incorporate a transformation of a baby starfish either blending or a sea grape transforming into a starfish or have the starfish be a part of the sea grapes. Below are some of the photo references that I am using for my final project:


 Both of these are halymenia.




Below are gracilaria,





And finally the sea grapes,