Piece de Resistance

Could not wait to share this one with you guys. Very intricate mask; copper piercing and then inlaid silver into some of the cutouts. Used my firing technique to get all the awesome colors.

This is the back. The silver inlay are the yellowish shapes in the copper.

Free Reign in Module 4

So, I'm almost done with module 3 and have been working in module 4 instead. Because I can. And it turns out all those copper pieces I was just making for fun can count towards my jewelry line for module 4. I'm pretty proud of the next few pieces:

This piece I actually made a while back and forgot that I had it. Small turquoise stone in the center. The beige is actually part of the stone and not a chip or anything. Since I seem to have an obsession with piercing, again, I drew out a design, glued it to the metal, sawed out the image, soldered on the bezel, made sure the piece was the color I wanted, and then last set the stone.

More piercing. This one I soldered silver domes onto, give it something a little extra. Originally it did not have this shiny appearance. I had cut out the the copper, did my soldering, and then fired it up. Something wasn't right though. After working on another piece I went back and used the technique I picked up. Smoothing the metal out, burnishing it up to a shine, and then firing.

In this project I had some fun trying to figure out how to set the stone in. Luckily, when I soldered the bezel into the design, I did not solder the swirls to the edge of the bezel. This way, I pulled the swirl out, and was able to use a reciprocating hammer. The piece is attached to the flex-shaft. When you press the pedal it makes the tip of the hammer tap at the metal with much more force and with more precision than can be done by hand. Before setting though- because of all my soldering I wanted to make sure my joints were strong, so I threw the piece in the pickle to get rid of any dirt or grime that might be holding the piece together, and not the solder. I fired the piece after. It's a little hard to tell with this picture, but because of the pickle the texture is a bit frosty as opposed to having a sheen underneath like when I burnished the above cuff, or leave the metal unburnished and it looks like leather.

This one, is what I'm really proud of. This was the piece I figured out the burnishing and then firing technique on. Simply cut out a flat sheet of copper, took forever to texturize using a giant ball burr. Because of the burring, the metal became very rough so I needed to burnish it smooth. After burnishing I fired it up. This is actually after it's second firing. First firing, colors were not as strong and I think they started to fade, so this afternoon I went and made the colors stronger. I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but with this piece after quenching, I wouldn't dry it before applying the flame again. It's seems it's also a matter of how close I hold the flame to the piece, starting off close and then pulling away. Certainly the size of the flame also matters. But yeh, totally stoke about this one.

And now, unrelated to jewelry, I know construction and quality are certainly not amazing from a professional point of view, but I sewed together an outfit. Material is cotton jersey:

Angle of the picture makes me look super freaking short, but the pants come to just past calf length.

More module 3

So, this post has only one project but I am soooo excited about it. Still working in wax. This was a wax carve-out. Basically carving an image/design into the wax. Back in my last semester in college my final senior "thesis" of sorts was a series of pen and ink drawings that were abstractions of a coiled snake. Here's just one of the 10 I had made:

To start I drew out a new design. We reduced the image down to the size I wanted for my pendent. After gluing the piece of paper onto a flat block of wax I poked holes into it deep into the wax in order to get an outline of all the details in the image. After peeling the paper off there was just a lot of carving to do. Since I wanted to increase the 3-dimensionality of the piece I carved it so that the pendent would be domed. Then I needed to hollow out the back. When I considered that design done I weighed the wax and did the conversion factor to see how much silver I would need- 43.5 grams of silver. IE a fuckton. So, more thinning out of the wax form was called for. When I finished, the calculation came out to 32.5 grams, so, MUCH better, but still a lot. For casting I had to add on a network of sprues for the metal to flow through the entire piece and attach it to a base:

Apparently I took the picture before I added the last 2 sprues (one on either side of the pink wax).
After all of that added wax- the piece came out to needing about 42 grams of silver. We did a process known as investing, which is creating a plaster mold of the wax. A steel cylinder is placed into the rubber base and looks like this. The plaster is then poured into the cylinder and allowed to cure. After, you pry the rubber base off and now have a hole for the wax to melt out of when placed into the oven. Next is the actual casting, which is awesome.
Had to saw off the entire sprue system. Normal polishing involves two steps: zam compound which is more of a burnisher and takes away metal, and step two is the rouge compound which really buffs a piece up and does not take off any metal. I took my piece and zammed it. Then, I went and got the silver-black which is a sulfur mixture that antiques silver. I got the entire piece nice and black, made sure to get into every crevice. Then I rouged up the piece and left certain areas in the piece antiqued. This makes the piece look even more defined. Gives it character:

I forgot to mention that I also carved out a little wax form for the bale to hold the pendent. Polished it up the same way as the pendent itself. Drilled a hole into each piece and connected them with a jump ring. The chain is from another necklace.
Here's the back of the piece all hollowed out. Had the texture in the wax and it came out just like I wanted. What's fun is having hollowed it out, it's not a smooth interior- it looks like the outside inversed:

So, there you have it!