Totally Off Topic

I moved to Prince Edward Island because it's surrounded by water, life is so much more relaxed here and because it's almost snake-free.  Since I have a full blown snake phobia, that's very important to me.  And the few snakes that are reputed to live here, stay out of the water, which is even more important to me.
But I digress.  As an added bonus to the gorgeous scenery and beaches every five minutes, the people here are wonderful, particularly in the village where I live.

Just for instance, a lobster fisherman who lives down the street has three trucks.  He drives one himself, the second is what he calls "the village truck," available to anyone who needs to borrow a truck for any reason, and the third has a snowplow on it so that he can run around and make sure nobody actually has to use a shovel in the wintertime.  He has plowed my store lot for two years and we have a big argument every spring about payment.  He seems to feel that he should do it for nothing.

But the person really responsible for me needing to share my thoughts is Harry.  Harry is one of those characters who live in small towns and is tolerated mainly for his entertainment value.  He doesn't have steady work, lives in a tag-along trailer and doesn't have a vehicle.  Don't get me wrong, Harry is very smart and very kind, especially to disadvantaged kids, unless you've made the mistake of slighting or insulting him.  His memory for insults is almost as long as his fuzzy beard.  If he likes you, though, he'll cut your grass as he passes and lets you know if he's found any real deals that you might be interested in.
Somehow in his wheeling and dealing, Harry came into possession of a John Deere riding lawnmower.  This mower has become his transportation and in the summer, it tows a peculiar looking wagon, complete with armchair.  The mounties turn a blind eye when they see Harry and his friend Ira chugging up the road with Ira in the armchair and both raising a beer in a friendly salute to the law.  The wagon putts up and down the street full of kids and the plastic pop bottles Harry helps them collect for their next trip to Ontario.  Another neighbour rigged the John Deere up with headlights so that Harry could see and be seen when he stayed too long at Ira's in the other village and has to come home in the dark.
The same good neighbour helped him put a plow on the little tractor for the winter and he toots all over the village cleaning sidewalks, driveways and even the front stoop of the store.  John Deere should use this lawn tractor for a commercial, because it must be indestructible.  The other night I was up late and heard Harry coming up the road, figuring he was out late and was on his way home.  But the tractor noise didn't go away, so I stuck my head out to see what he was up to.  Dear old Harry was plowing snow at midnight, talking to himself non-stop, and when I went out to the porch, all I could hear over the tractor was him ranting something about a chicken getting away.  It wasn't hard to tell that there was more than beer involved and I hollered at him to go home to bed.  The next morning he was bright-eyed and bushy bearded when he came in to the store for his coffee and I asked him what his chicken problem was the night before.  Apparently the fellow down the street had repaid his plowing with good company and moonshine, and a frozen chicken.  He couldn't carry the chicken and drive, so he sat on it as he made his way home with a few side trips to clean up some snow and the chicken kept slipping out from underneath him, trying to make the great escape.  All the fault of the shine, of course.
How many of you live in a place where you know all of your neighbours, their parents and grandparents, and who lived in their house since it was built?  And how many of you can turn off your televisions and watch funnier things going on outside than any comedy show?  I've made mistakes in my life, but moving here was definitely not one of them.  I am truly blessed.

Never, NEVER Get Overconfident

My previous post was about prong setting and how it was such a nice change from swirly wire wrapping.  An Amazonite cab was my maiden voyage and, because I started with the most simple setting and actually followed instructions, it turned out rather nice.  Naturally, I figured it was pretty easy and I was now an expert.  Not!

The prong setting requires 16 gauge square wire (I use 93.5% slow tarnish argentium silver) and although you can use a lighter wire, the 16 gauge makes it good and strong.  My stash was getting very low and I only had about a foot left for my second attempt.  (Canadians are kind of schizophrenic about measurement - we flip back and forth from metric to imperial, depending on the subject.)  I had a rhodonite heart picked up at a gem show sometime, somewhere, and decided that I'd push the envelope a little with this one.  It was going to have a double bail - no problem, just add an extra wire in the centre.  I toyed with the idea of balling the prong ends with my torch, but that would have required using pickle and putting the prong bundle in the tumbler to clean it up and that would harden it.  It was actually the pickle that made up my mind, because I have no ventilation in the winter and I'm afraid of gassing my dogs.  So I decided to hammer the prongs flat, instead.  

You can't really see what went wrong from this picture of the back of the heart.  The double prong worked out fine and I would do that with all of these settings; it looks nicer.  The original instructions called for the tail pieces from the bail to be folded flat against the wraps, but I like the loops, it looks more finished.  But this is the second attempt.  The first looked just as good but I kept getting interrupted and didn't do a good job plotting the angle of the wires and where they intersected with the stone.  It's very important to be accurate because you have to file the wire where it bends.  Since my measurements were out, I kept bending and straightening one of the prong wires until, naturally, it broke right off.  

It wouldn't have been a big deal for me to start right over.  Except for the fact that I didn't have enough wire left.  So I snipped the bail wires right at the wrap to use as prong wires and had just enough wire left to use for bail wires.  Just.  Which is why the prongs are so close to the centre at the top and bottom.  I thought I was past the stage of wasting wire trying new techniques!  My credit card got another workout because I put an order in to MonsterSlayer for more argentium and of course, you can't just order wire.  When it arrives, I'll redo the whole thing.  (Maybe it'll be warm enough to try the ball prongs and take the pickle out on my porch!  And maybe groundhogs really can predict the weather.  Maybe pigs will fly while we're at it.)

I guess if you don't try something, you'll never know how it will turn out.  I now know that I don't like the hammered prongs.  I wish I had learned all of these things when the price of silver was down under $10 an ounce.  I also know that rhodonite has a MOHS hardness of 5.5 - 6.5 and this one looks like it has a fault line right down the front but it took a lot of abuse with a leather mallet and didn't break.  

And I know that I still have a lot to learn. 

Prong Set Amazonite Necklace

Taking a gemstone cabochon and manipulating wire to encase and showcase it is one of my favorite parts of jewelry making.  Trouble is, eventually, they all looked the same to me.  Sure, you can vary the wraps up the stone and everybody seems to have a signature way of swirling the left-over wire at the top, but it's still a beautiful gemstone with distracting swirlies.
About six months ago, I ordered a book from Amazon, called "Wiresmithing" by Jim McIntosh.  He gives very clear instructions for a technique of prong setting cabochons, instead of the traditional wirewrapping.  It took me quite a while to decide to try it, but it was a Eureka moment.  Not only do you get to do wraps, you can fuse, solder, hammer and create beautiful frames for your cabs.

My first attempt was a very simple wrap with prongs and no fire involved, but it was a pretty amazonite cab and the simplicity of the wrap really turns the stone into the focal point it should be.

I matched it with some amazonite beads, sterling beads and spacers and a Hill Tribes silver flower clasp.  And a purple ceramic hummingbird for a bit of whimsy.

Amazonite is a type of feldspar, relatively uncommon, and its subtle creamy blue suits its metaphysical properties of soothing and calming one's emotions.

And hummingbirds?  They're my idea of an avian Jack Russell!  Always busy, cranky little beasties who have no idea how small they really are.

This necklace is sold.

This Could Be Embarrassing

A subject that seems to come up frequently on the jewelry forums is about organizing.  Over and over, people will write in and ask how other artisans organize their beads and findings.  And we're all so full of good advice - probably comes under the heading of "them that cannot do, teach."  Flipping through various websites, I just found a T shirt that I want to order by the gross - it says, "Organized people are too lazy to look for things!"
Oh, lordy, whoever wrote that is my hero forever and ever.  All these years, I made excuses for myself. " I'm artistic - artistic people can't be organized, it's not in their nature."  "I'm just naturally disorganized, it's my nature."  "I'm a very visual person - I have to have everything out in front of me."
Ha!  Now I've seen the light!  It's not me that's wrong, lazy or neatness-challenged, it's organized people who are basically lazy and having a place for everything is a personality fault, not a good trait.
Not only am I chronically disorganized, I'm a disorganized hoarder. Hoarding is defined in the dictionary as “a supply or accumulation that is hidden or carefully guarded for preservation, future use, etc.” Well, isn't that a good thing?  What if you threw it out or gave it to someone else?  Soon as you did that, you'd need it, sure as shootin'.  Other people were Cleopatra or kings and queens in their past lives.  I must have been a junk dealer.

I have made reasonably successful attempts to organize my jewelry stuff.  My first purchase was a few winters ago, when I was looking in Canadian Tire for a snow shovel.  In their tool department (so I love shopping in hardware stores!) they had nifty 40-drawer chests on sale for $15.  The drawers were all see-through plastic and of course it was going to be the answer to my clutter, so I bought two.  It was great fun sorting everything into drawers and I found stuff I'd forgotten I even had.  Wow!  thought me, I'm all neat and organized!
Of course, I couldn't do any work, because it was all packed neatly into drawers and I just didn't feel like it.  That was a long, dry spell and lasted until I rooted through the drawers and pulled about ten of them out and put them on my kitchen table.  Then I had to pull out the remaining 70 drawer to find my findings and jump rings and when I did, had no idea if they were silver or base metal.  I had taken them out of their original packaging to make them fit in the drawers.  And some of the beads - are they glass, or old WalMart plastic beads from my cheap beginnings?  Well, damn, this isn't going to work.

My next foray into organization was a trip to the dollar store.  They had nifty little trays, plastic containers and labelling stuff.  All the sterling silver could be in one container (with dividers, of course) and all the base metal findings could be in another.  Labelled.  Then, a trip to WalMart snagged a cheap 4-drawer dresser thingy that is really quite perfect for my kind of organizing.  More on that later.  I brought an old, felt card table down from upstairs and set it up in my livingroom, and started dumping the little drawers on it to organize.  Big beads in one wooden tray, smaller beads in another wood tray...Oh, look, wouldn't that look good together?  That card table with my beads dumped on it stayed in place for a couple of months and it was probably the most productive beading period I had.
A call from the real estate agent that someone wanted to look at my store and apartment put an abrupt halt to my messy fun.  Trays and containers full of swarovskis and sterling findings got thrown in the top drawer, beads in the second drawer, wire and polishing cloths in the third, and since I had started doing fusing, soldering and art clay, all of the tools for that in the bottom.  All of my base metal findings and cheaper beads were in the 40-drawer units.  I know enough not to stash things in a closet, because prospective buyers could be hurt when everything comes tumbling down, but drawers...if they open my hastily stacked drawers, it's their own fault.
It's actually a good system for me.  Nothing got labelled and nothing is neat in the drawers, but I can see all the beads and find all the findings.  Usually.  It still migrates out to my kitchen table or whatever flat surface is available, but I can hide it fast.

To complement my newfound organizational skills, I thought it was time to get another bead board.  My first board seemed to get buried with ongoing, unfinished projects, so a new, uncluttered one would be great to start a new project on.  Yes, I really am self-delusional.  Now I have two cluttered bead boards and work on a place mat at the kitchen table.  I HAVE to put it away then, or I'd have no place to eat.
Well, thought me, what I need is a big tray that I could move around with everything I needed for the project on it.  Then I could eat at the table and set it on the drawers when I wasn't working on it.  My dear car-pool buddy from my previous life had given me a beautiful hand-painted wooden tray - perfect!  That lasted about a week and "things" kept getting stashed on it.  Boxes, an easel, rulers, tools that came from eBay for beading classes, projects to be melted down...it's got so much crap on it I have no idea what is under it.  I hope she doesn't read this blog.
So I could give people wonderful lessons about how to organize.  Just don't ask me how to STAY organized.  If you really feel the need to be that neat and know where everything is at every moment, you have a terrible personality disorder and are basically lazy.  And I have the T shirt to prove it.

Chain maille watch

This Persian weave watch band is approximately 8" long, meant to hang loose.  It is made of copper and aluminum, with a stainless steel watch.  The copper will darken with use and age, making a greater contrast between it and the bright aluminum.  $35 CDN


And yes, Virginia, cutting steel wire with a Koil Kutter is a no-no.  

A short commercial

During my first few years of jewelry making, I accumulated a few necessary tools, but the ones I used the most and couldn't do without were a pair of bent-nose pliers from Canadian Tire.  They cost a whole $1.25 each and had no grooves to mark the wire.  They're getting pretty ratty and when I ordered some supplies from MonsterSlayer, I splurged and ordered a pair of Wubbers bent chain-nose pliers.
Well, I think I've died and gone to Heaven!  What a difference!  Guess someone would be pretty happy with hamburger until they got fed a good steak, but now I want more Wubbers. Steak!  No more hamburger!
So pardon me if this does sound like a commercial, but I can't believe I've limped along for years thinking that I was so clever getting cheap pliers.  I'd better get busy with all the wire that just arrived and sell something, because now I need the whole set. 

Catching Up

It's been a busy month since I got my new toys and no time to make new jewelry.  The year-end has to be done for the store which seems to take every bit of free time available.  I thought I was ahead of the game this year and right up-to-date with my accounting, but apparently I'm delusional.
My son came to visit for the best part of a week and that was another week with nothing done (but my house is clean!) but we had a wonderful time just talking and watching hours of old WKRP in Cincinnati reruns.  He isn't the kind of man that normally wears jewelry, but he kept fondling my Persian chain prototype until finally I put a clasp on it and gave it to him.  He liked the fact that it wasn't perfect - does that say something about both of us? 
Although I didn't make anything other than the Persian bracelet, the Koil Kutter got lots of use and I think I wrecked the blade today trying to cut galvanized steel jump rings.  Lots of copper and aluminum to practice with, though, and I tried a few patterns just to see if the old brain could get around them.

From top to bottom:
European 4 in One
Helm Chain
Barrel Chain
Persian
Dragon Scale






The Dragon Scale is a really cool pattern, although my tiny sample doesn't show its beauty.  It takes a gazillion jump rings and a ton of patience, so once I figured out how to do it, I couldn't see how I would ever use it and quit.

Byzantine is a pattern with lots of potential and a lot of fun to make, but it wasn't fun trying to get it to sit right for a picture.  It's much nicer in person than the picture on the right shows.
The kitchen table is starting to get its comfortable jewelry making clutter again and I'm working on a Persian chain watch band - stay tuned!  There won't be any more chain maille after that one until I order another blade for my Kutter.  No more steel wire!