02.16.23 Forging Ahead

About those rings...

since we saw the kids in DC last weekend - our first trip back since the fall - I figured today would be a good time to post.

The wedding was absolutely the highlight - and in many ways the saving grace - of 2022.

Our son and daughter in law worked so hard to make sure everyone had a part - and by the end of the week we were all one big family - 

although most of us had never met before.

Not quite a year ago (March 2022), we went to DC to visit and start planning the big event; standing on the balcony of the wedding venue, they asked me to make their wedding rings.  

In hindsight I don't know why I hesitated - even for a moment - because it was so much fun; and now a piece of me (and my heart) is with them every day.

I reached out to my friend and teacher, De Pastel, and we set up a schedule to work together on the rings.  I also gave the kids some assignments...go try on some rings, see what they liked, and to get their ring sizes.

We were supposed to travel early in the summer, to meet our son's future in-laws and while we were there I was going to get an impression of the engagement ring to make sure that when I made my daughter in law's wedding band, it would be a perfect fit.  

The trip never happened, so I sent instructions and the thermoplastic to DC without me, and the US mail took care of getting it back and forth.

With the size information and their metal choices - 14 K gold, yellow for him, palladium white for her - De and I got to work.

The rings were made through a process called forging - basically beating the metal into submission. I started with ring stock - 2 mm half round for her ring, and 6 mm comfort fit for his - which, with De's guidance, I carefully measured and cut to the appropriate length.

We started with the smaller, easier ring - shaping it on a mandrel, heating it when it became work hardened, and hammering and heating again, until it began to form a circle.

The next step was to make the ends meet. The first one went pretty quickly, but I'll admit, that my arms were sore at the end of the day because it was a whole lot of work to bend a piece of solid gold 6 mm wire.

Despite being tired, I was very satisfied that after a few hours at De's bench. With her instruction and supervision, what I had in front of me was beginning to look a lot like a pair of wedding bands.

Clearly - they weren't finished - but there was no question left in my mind that I was going to have them done in plenty of time for the wedding.

Everything about making the rings brought me joy.  

Being back at a bench, with tools in my hands, time with De (including a couple of wonderful P. Terry's lunches during our sessions), and knowing that once they put them on, my kids would wear them out into the world as symbols of their love and commitment.

I went back to De's studio for a second day to finish the work.  At the end of the first day, the bands were round-ish...but "ish" was not what we were going for...the goal was perfection.  De's years of experience and eagle eye were invaluable as I continued to shape and size the rings before cleaning and polishing them.

I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of my work - there were no uneven edges, no seams or even tiny specks of solder visible - just continuous, shiny, gold rings.

I sent pictures, but the kids didn't actually see the rings until just a couple of days before the wedding.  Fortunately, they had been very good about getting their hands sized properly, and we were very careful in our measurement.

The result - perfect fits on both bands!

While the rings were for them, the process was a gift for me.  Time at the bench and with De reminded me how much joy there is in making things...

...especially when those things are special, one of a kind pieces of jewelry (inspired by the one of a kind people they were made for).

The only thing better than visits with my kids...is seeing the rings on their hands when I do.

Until next time.

01.27.20 Something's bugging me...

While I (almost) always have a work plan when I go into the studio, it's usually about the stones I've chosen for that week - I don't set out to make a collection, or a group of pieces around a single theme...

...the realization that I have created a group of related pieces comes later, usually when I am updating my Etsy shop, or have finished all my work in progress and start thinking about what to do next.

I do a lot of things with a Southwestern theme, boots and saguaro cactus on turquoise, I've even done a couple prickly pears recently.

I've done a few birds, and as it turns out, I've also done bugs...quite a number of them.

It started in my first kinetic jewelry class, a couple of years ago, with De Pastel...when I decided to use a small monarch opal with a caterpillar on the back, because it made me think of Heimlich (who is bright green, as is the stone), from the movie A Bug's Life.




I'm not entirely sure WHY I thought of this particular bug - perhaps it was because when the movie came out (in 1998) it quickly became my daughter's favorite (she was three at the time) - and we watched it A LOT!


In any case, I wore the pendant recently, while working on some new pieces...including one with a dragonfly on the back. It occurred to me, for someone who doesn't like bugs...I sure have put them on a lot of pendants.

I made another kinetic pendant, with a small red and black stone (a bonus cab from one of my vendors) after making Heimlich, because I thought it looked like a ladybug (also one of the cast of characters in the movie).

I've done a "hunny" bee, inspired by Winnie the Pooh, and most recently the aforementioned dragonfly (which sold so quickly at a holiday trunk show, that I made another).

I purchased a couple of beautiful black mother of pearl cabs late last year, and when they arrived, I laid them side by side and thought they looked like dragonfly wings...that's generally how the cutouts evolve - it's not so much that I buy a cabochon with a specific design in mind (although that happens), more often the ideas flow once I have the stone in my hand.



Often, I'll buy a stone because I like the way it looks, with no real idea of how I will use it; with some pieces the designs pop into my head almost instantly, with others it takes a while, and there have been a few where the stone didn't speak clearly to me, and I made (and unmade) the piece more than once.

So there you have it - there's not as much method as madness in my design approach...but so far, it seems to be working.

Until next time.

03.11.19 The third time's the charm

Photo credit: Creative Side

This little black onyx cabochon was one of the first stones I ever bought - and it's finally found its happy place.

The first time I used it was in my Fabrication 201 class, because it seemed to be a perfect compliment  to the teardrop shaped hollow form earrings I made.

I love the earrings - and I wear them a lot - but the hinge on the original pendant didn't work, and I just wasn't happy with it.

So, I popped the stone out, recycled the silver and put it into a different necklace.  The second time, I paired it with a larger piece of petrified palm in the first two stone necklace I made. 

I was definitely getting there, because that time I put a hamsa on the back of the pendant - which I have retained in the third iteration of the piece.

While the concept was good - after a while, I realized I still wasn't happy (I've made other two stone necklaces that I like much better). 

Aesthetically, the look fell flat, and it didn't hang particularly well when it was worn.  This is the benefit of practice - your work continues to improve, and working with sustainable, recyclable materials means you can remake a piece.

So recently, I popped it out of the setting - again - and I set it a third time. 

This was the charm!  

My work is better, and the stone is complemented by the patina on the setting (it just didn't pop in the plain setting). I kept the hamsa, this time with addition of an evil eye.

I'm calling it "These Dark Times". The world we live in is turbulent and unsettling, and I wanted something that felt like an amulet...and it looks great with the earrings.

This isn't the first time I've remade a piece - and it won't be the last - and that doesn't bother me.  My goals with metalsmithing have always been to make things I want to wear - and to keep learning.  

Until next time.

11.12.18 It's about more than cookies

Being a Girl Scout has been part of my life for almost 50 years.

Fun fact: more than half of the women elected to the 116th Congress were Girl Scouts.

For me, it started as a Brownie, in elementary school (that's me in the third row, in my uniform). I was a troop leader and a cookie mom for years while my daughter was involved in scouting.





I was really delighted when earlier this year, not one, but two local troops asked me to come spend an afternoon and help them earn their jewelry badges.






I took my roll of hand tools, my saw, and some pendants - both finished and unfinished - and spent part of an afternoon talking to them about the art and skill involved in metalsmithing.



They were good listeners, asked great questions and reminded me how eager young people are to learn - especially when you make the teaching relevant.

We talked about the history of jewelry, and that many metal techniques have been around for thousands of years...some of them have changed very little (lost wax casting, for example) and others have been modernized and automated (the use of CAD and 3D printing in design).

I spent some time on stones, too. I explained the difference between precious and semi precious designations; geography and the impacts of mining; that I don't cut my own stones, but rely on lapidary artists for the beautiful cabochons I use.

Not only was it fun, and a little nostalgic, to hang out with these girls and their moms - but it made me think about how important it is to remind our kids (and ourselves) that there is value in creating things that make us happy.

I hope this post will inspire you to do something you enjoy - and find time to you share it with a young person in your life.

Until next time.

06.11.08 Let's Move - Kinetic Jewelry, Part 1

Photo credit: Hannah Wilson, CSJA

Although I'm always learning and improving my skills when I'm working in the studio, it had been quite a while since I taken a class. I was thrilled when I saw that De Pastel (my instructor for 201 - intermediate fabrication) would be teaching over a weekend right around my birthday!

We touched on kinetics at the end of 201, doing simple rivets and a hinge, and the riveted hollow form earrings from that class are among my favorites and I wear them often...but I hadn't touched tubing since, and I was excited about the opportunity to re-learn and improve on these techniques.

De sent us an email asking for ideas and the projects we had in mind.  She wrote "there are so many kinetic options in our field, this will allow me to hone the class on specific techniques you all want to learn and give you all the most information for your time in class."

I had two things I knew I wanted to do...the first was to remake a pair of turquoise earrings with the same riveted earwires as the hollow forms, and the second was to do another hinge (I was never happy with the one on 201 pendant - mostly because even though it looked fine, I got too much solder on it so the bail didn't move).

I love the stones in these earrings - but they were an early attempt at bezel setting, and because of their depth they never hung properly from the jump ring at the back.  So I pried them out of the silver and started over.

Two years on from the first attempt (at both the earrings and working with tubing) it's safe to say that I am a much better - and faster - metalsmith.  By lunchtime (halfway through the first day) and I had rebuilt the earrings, and now they looked like I wanted them to!

I was on to the next project - a hinged bail, a lot like the one I had done previously, but hopefully with a better result.  My recollection was that this was a really difficult task - and I expected that the pendant I had designed for this project would take up most of the remaining two and a half days.


I had given this particular piece a lot of thought.  Because the stone was rectangular, like a door, and the bail would be hinged (also, like a door), I wanted to create a pendant that looked like a mezuzah (the prayer scrolls mounted on the door frames of Jewish homes).

I started with the setting for the stone.  Rather than my typical bezel, I wanted to do a type of tab setting known as "score and fold" - which is exactly what it sounds like.  I had done the piercing (the Hebrew letter Shin) a few days before class, so I was able to move directly into forming the metal to hold the stone.

Just as it had been with the earrings, cutting the tubing and getting it soldered to the setting wasn't nearly as daunting as I had anticipated...

so, there I was at the end of the first day, with both of my planned projects finished.   It was a good feeling - but it meant I had to take my tired brain home and come up with something to do next!

Until next time (when I'll tell you more about the weekend).

05.28.18 When my baby smiles at me, I go to Rio...

Photo credit: NBC/SNL

actually, it's probably me who is smiling, because the Rio I am referring to is Rio Grande Jewelry Supply...and if I'm on their website, it means I'm buying more supplies!

Remember how Stefon (City Correspondent for SNL) said "this place has EVERYTHING"...





Well, they really do - and these days my average order with them is several hundred dollars of silver wire, sheet, chain - pretty much everything I need to make my pendants and earrings.  Not just metal - they are a one stop for all things jewelry.

I got so excited the last time a box arrived, I posted it as an Instagram story - and the Rio shared it!!



I also love their customer service...

my favorite pair of pliers has replaceable nylon jaws.  I use them all the time, and I love them because they don't leave marks on the metal.  After a while, the jaws got thin, and the screws were starting to poke through, so I ordered a replacements.  When the new nylon pieces arrived, I took the screws out of the old ones and tried to put the new ones in place...except...they were the wrong size.




I thought perhaps I had ordered incorrectly - so I called Rio, and after a bit of back and forth it turned out that while the part number had stayed the same, the pliers (and the replacement jaws) were actually different from the ones I had ordered a year before.


For some companies, that probably would have been the end of it - but instead - one of their parts managers said he would investigate and in the mean time, sent me a new pair of pliers, no charge.

Their folks are great in person, too. I had the opportunity to meet a few of them when they came to Austin to visit Creative Side to talk with the staff and members (like me) about our journey as makers.

When you watch the video, you will see why I love being in the studio with these amazing, creative people.  If you look carefully, you will also see the frog pendant in progress!

We live in tumultuous, stressful times, but thanks to Rio, I can keep calm and solder on.

Until next time.

06.26.17 The Shape of Things to Come

You would think, as much as I love earrings, that I would make a lot of them - right? Except, I haven't...at least not until now.

I mean, I have made some - mostly in classes - like the hollow forms I made in Fabrication 201, and the pairs I made in the week long argentium class with Ronda Coryell...

but until very recently I'd been making almost nothing but pendants.


I can think of several reasons for this - not the least of which is earrings are too small to put a cutout on the back, and to make a pair of bezel set earrings is almost twice as much work as making a pendant.  Not only do you have to do everything twice, the bezels are much smaller, and they are much easier to melt.


But then a friend told me she wanted a pair of earrings - and was pretty specific about what she was looking for...she wanted them to be stone, have both pink and purple, and be dangly.  Well, two out of three would have been pretty easy - but it took me quite a while to find something that filled the bill.

I looked and looked, and came upon a lovely pair of matched fluorite bars - but they were drilled - so instead of bezel setting them, I asked her if she would be ok if I just made some custom earwires? She said yes - and suddenly a whole new set of design ideas came into my head.

I realized that not every piece has to involve sheet and solder - but finding great stones and giving them elegant, hand formed earwires gives me the opportunity to make beautiful pieces that are not as expensive as my pendants (but do go with them very nicely) - because they don't require as much time, or metal.

In my bead box, I had some drilled sea glass, collected over year of trips to the bead store in the Outer Banks - and I thought - what the heck, I'll make earrings out of those, too.

Finally, I decided to create some simple silver earrings with small stones - which do involve a little bit of metalsmithing - and can be replicated because I can buy multiples of the 6 mm turquoise and coral cabochons.


I'm really pleased to be able to put some smaller pieces - at lower price points - in my shop...especially when it means I can still make beautiful things when I have a little less time to work with.

I hope you'll go check out the earrings - as there are more on the way.

Until next time.

02.27.17 You go back, Jack, and do it again...

What a difference a year makes!  When I first wrote about this gray labradorite - and the pendant I made - I had really just begun designing and fabricating, and I was still working in sterling (now everything I do is in argentium).  

I wrote then that "when I saw this stone I had two thoughts...first, that I HAD TO have it; and second that it made me think of a Texas thunderstorm.  The shape is a perfect raindrop, and the color really is like the dark gray of a storm with flashes of lightning."  It still looks like that to me.




I decided to call it "Thunder and Lightning" and put a lightning bolt on the reverse.  I remember being pleased with pendant when I finished - given my skill level at the time - but since then, when I've pulled it out to wear, I looked at it and decided I wasn't happy after all. It was not because I hadn't done good work - I had, but I've learned so much since then.



With many, many more hours at the bench under my belt, I could see so many things I wanted to fix - I would just put it back in the drawer.  After doing that a few times, I decided I was going to take the stone out of the first setting and remake the pendant.

There were some things from the original concept that I definitely wanted to retain, like the lightning bolt and the twisted wire around the bezel - and other things that I wanted to improve.

The first time, the point on my bezel was crimped, I had flattened the granules in the process of sanding the piece, the list of newbie mistakes goes on...so...


I cut the bezel just enough to pop out the stone, and got busy making a new one - this time in argentium.  I kept the lightning bolt on the reverse, and the twisted wire - but I used serrated bezel wire, to echo the sharp edges in the lightning bolt, and put a small trio of granules at the bottom of the drop. 




I finished the metal work, then once again added patina.


The result was the pendant I had originally envisioned - when my ideas outpaced my ability.  It's really gratifying that a year (and many hours at the bench) later, I am able to produce the kind of work I really want to wear.

Until next time.

01.25.16 Fabrication (part 2)

Honestly, now that I have learned the basics of stone setting, I could spend all my time thinking up new things to make, and working in the studio…but I’m getting ahead of myself.  You will recall that I started thinking about this part of the class months ago – and started looking at cabochons for the two pendants I would make in class.

I had a very clear mental image of how I wanted my Fordite pendant to turn out – and I couldn’t be more pleased with the final result.  It helps that I had really great instruction, and that because of its composition, Fordite turned out to be an excellent material for my first bezel set piece.

Once again -we started with just a couple of pieces of plain silver.  A square of 20 gauge sheet for the backing and bail, and bezel wire. The first steps were to size and shape the bezel and solder it to the silver sheet.  Because I wanted my piece to have a hammered texture, I did that first, before attaching the bezel to the backing.


At the suggestion of my instructor, I added a cut out heart to the back of the bezel - a little something extra.  I really liked this idea because it helps tell the story of each piece of jewelry.

After finishing the opening on the reverse, I cut my bezel backing to the shape I wanted, created a bail and a jump ring, and was ready to solder all my pieces together and polish them.


Setting the stone is the very last thing - so once my setting was clean, shiny and finished on the edges, I put my fordite into the bezel and tightened it to hold the cabochon in.  The result is a beautiful pendant that I am really, really enjoying.

Our final week was also devoted to stone setting - this time with tabs rather than bezels.  A somewhat simpler technique (although I confess I prefer the bezels) - and good for irregular stones, it just what it sounds like - creating tabs that hold a stone in place against a backing.

For this project I chose a triangular labradorite cabochon, and decided to put an Erlenmeyer flask cut out on the back - a nod to my daughter, I'm calling this piece "chem lab".

The first steps included sawing out the reverse opening, and space in the tabs so that they could be folded over the stone.  After getting the backing filed down to the proper size, I realized I hadn't fully thought through how to attach the bail...of course...this is why we have instructors, and Shalena came to my aid.

She helped me bend up the top tab so that I could position and solder on a jump ring, then it was time to think about a bail.  I decided I wanted the bail to follow the open triangle design I had for the tabs, so I formed one using square wire.  The result was a split bail, that looked great on the finished pendant.

I learned SO much in this class - and I am so pleased with how the pieces turned out.  I'm looking forward to spending time in open studio working on my metal skills between now and my next class (probably Fabrication 201 in the spring).

Until next time.