BeadMam Handcrafted Jewelry
Welcome to my Musings
Welcome to my Musings
| Sunset Bracelet - YoJ Week 14 |
 Sunset Bracelet is my first entry into Year of Jewelry. It is week 14 because YoJ 2007 started in January but I didn't find out about it until March. That meant I couldn't sign up until the 2nd quarter, week 14. If you want to check out YoJ go to http://creativewirejewelryyoj.typepad.com/cwj_yoj_2007/ . It is a personal challenge to create a new finished piece of jewelry each week and post it to YoJ. There are suggested weekly themes that are optional. The current theme, April Showers, just did not ring my bell since we have had very few showers this year and none in April. The piece was done using a tutorial available from Eni Oken, a fabulous jewelry maker here in So. Calif. Check out her site http://www.enioken.com/ . Great stuff!! I made the beads (lampwork) over several months. When I thought about making the bracelet I combed my collection to come up with a set I could work with. I decided to work with copper since silver has gotten so expensive. Of course that meant buying copper wire, 26 and 28 gauge, and charms and tiny copper beads etc. Darn! LOL At least I had the heavy copper wire, 14 and 16 gauge, in my stash. The process entails stringing the beads on 14 ga wire, winding the 26 ga wire around them and then coiling the 28 ga wire around that. Whew! Actially it is not as hard as I thought it would be. Now I have a new technique to add to my tool kit. |
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| New Work |
 I am working on designs that use my lampwork beads. It is a lot easier to make beads than it is to use them up and I am accumulating piles of beads. Here at last is a finished necklace using 11 beads. (That doesn't even make a dent in one pile. Sigh!) I made the links from 14ga round copper wire and hammerd them to get texture. The larger links are soldered closed. I had to leave the smaller links unsoldered since I had already closed the loops on the wire through the beads. Now on to my first "Year of Jewelry" piece. It is due Easter Sunday April 8. |
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| Better Late than Never? |
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| Redoing my studio |
| OK, let's try this again. I just spent hours writing this entry and then I carefully deleted it! Arghhh! I am redoing my studio. I was spending more time looking for stuff than making anything so time to bite the bullet and just DO IT. First I am getting rid of 30 plus years of STUFF! Well at least I got it out of my studio, nee garage. It is now on my driveway and patio. Now I can actually see the garage walls. I plan to use the studio for lampwork, silversmithing, ceramics, PMC, DIY and whatever else catches my fancy. Got to cram a lot of activities into one space, 20ft x 20ft. What? Plan ahead! No, it is much more fun to plan as I go along. Here is my progress so far. First things first, so the lampwork station has been moved and set up. I had to saw a hole, with my handy dandy sabre saw, in the garage wall for the ventilation ductwork. That was pretty scary but I did it and it worked. Sure glad I built my "Barley Box" on wheels. Just rolled it into place and pushed the duct through the hole. Voila! I am back to torching every morning.  The kiln and storage for lampwork tools etc. are to my left, the crockpot is to my right. Yes, I batch anneal my beads. It works well for me and I plan to continue for the foreseeable future.  Also to the right is my workbench. It has a new top. I sanded and polyurethaned 3/4 inch plywood, tore off the old stained and pitted top and screwed on the new one. It is bigger and there is room for some of my tools. Haven't decided where to put the soldering station yet. Those darn tanks take up so much room.  Next to the workbench is my major redo investment, a Craftsman rollaway tool chest. At long last all my tools are in one place. What luxury! No more scouting around for the right tool box. Next there are more shelves for storage and, in front, a new workbench I made for power tools. It holds the glass grinder, buffer and small drill press for the time being. There are rollaway drawers underneath with PMC materials and tools. Silver, copper and brass wire and sheet are stored in a file cabinet on wheels also underneath this workbench.  So far so good. Next to come are a cabinet hung on the wall and a second power tool workbench for the large drill press, belt sander and a bench grinder. Stay tuned. Same time, same station. |
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| Photography |
Well, its later so time to talk about photography. First let me introduce you to my partner, Pardner. Yes, that is like "Howdy, Pardner" from the old westerns. In fact his full AKC (American Kennel Club) name is Venture Ranch's Howdy Pardner. He is a chocolate Labrador Retriever, male, chow hound extraodinaire, gentle and loves his toys. Back to photography. I am talking specifically about taking good pictures of beads and jewelry for eBay, etc. Yes, eventually I want to sell my stuff on the internet. No, I don't expect to get the really big bucks like Pati Walton and others but I am going to try. So first I need to take good, very good pictures. I have a good digital camera. Nikon Coolpix 5700. I have a good photo studio thanks to a great tutorial by Evan at http://www.dawnandevan.com. He calls it the $5 Photo Studio. I already had lights and the cake cover so I bought the bracket to hold the camera and a bolt and wingnut to fasten the camera to the bracket. Here is my version.  It sits on my homemade light box. Here is a picture of a set of beads taken with this setup.  I had to play with the image in Corel PhotoPaint. I haven't got my camera technique down yet. I am taking the pictures with no compression or editing in the camera. That means TIFF and 300 dpi. First I crop the image then I resample to 72 dpi and set the max dimension at 300 pixels. I adjust the levels first then add some brightness and 15% sharpening. I need to study my camera controls so that I do not have to lighten the images so much and I haven't figured out why the original images are not sharp. I use a tripod and self-timer to reduce camera shake. Got to work on that. These two pictures show the same bracelet with a white background and then a light gray background.   Which one do your prefer? I am tending toward the light gray background. One last picture.  Back to the camera manual. More on photography later. |
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| My "Studio" |
| Thursday, April 20, 2006 I have the tpical southern California two car detached garage that is used for everything but housing my vehicle. It is a laundry room, silversmithing shop, tool shed, junk storage and lampworking studio. Some day I really am going to clean it out, get rid of the junk and make it a real studio. But, for now, it works.  I use a Minor Burner with propane and oxygen. The torch came from www.arrowsprings.com  The torch is mounted on a Creation Station which helps stabilize my hands and rest my arms. The armrest are adjustable and can be moved out of the way when necessary. There is a graphite pad mounted on the torch. The work surface base is quarry tile. There are two white ceramic tiles on top which allow me to see the flame and the bead more clearly. The line between the tiles helps me keep the mandrel level. I started using bottled oxygen in a medium sized cylinder. That soon became too expensive and awkward to keep full. It was a crisis when the oxygen ran out since I had no backup. I switched to an oxygen concentrator. It is the only way to go. I bought it from www.suncoastbeads.com.  I use a regular barbeque propane tank with a single stage regulator. The tank cost $20 at Costco so I bought 3 of them. When I run low on propane I swap in a new tank in a few minutes. It costs $20 to exchange a tank at my local hardware store.  The regulator came from www.arrowsprings.com. My original ventilation "system" was a partially opened garage door and a small fan. I had been torching only a few days before I started suffering from a sore throt, coughing and a painful chest. Whoa!!! I stopped torching and researched ventilation. I found the Barley Box on the internet and immediately built one for myself. I fitted it with a bathroom exhaust fan and hung the exhaust duct over the top of the partially opened garage door. No more breating problems.  I batch anneal my beads in the heated crock pot you see by the side of the BBox. I want to see what I've done and I don't want to wait all night until the beads have gone through their annealing cycle. I clean them and when I have enough I put them in bowl and into my computer controlled kiln to anneal. I lose very few beads to thermal shock. Usually those I "admire?" too long before I put them in the crock pot. As I torch I listen to music and the hours fly by. Since I am retired I can do this almost every day. Ah bliss! |
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| Confessions of a Wannabe Lampwork Artist |
| Sunday, April 23, 2006 Cloudy and cool today. Good day to go to a bead show, which I did. The semi-annual Los Angeles Bead society had their Spring show today. It is one of the best bead shows in the area. Lots of lampwork artists to see. Margaret Zinser was there. I took a class from her last October. She gives a great class and makes gorgeous beads. www.mzglass.com I hope to take another class this fall. Check with www.themandrel.com for classes. Donna Conklin is the owner and the shop is in Torrance near Del Amo. Here is what I bought at the show.  Not very exciting. But I am a bead maker after all. I have tons of my own beads waiting to be something.  See what I mean. These beads are waiting to be a necklace. Here it is in progress. This is a free-form peyote necklace incorporating my lampwork beads.  While we're here, this is my beading/jewelry making studio. Well, part of a corner in it.  I started making jewelry with beads during the 60s. I keep exploring crafts that can be applied to making jewelry.  For example, this choker uses wire wrapping with 14 gauge sterling wire. The beaded tubes were made with size 8 seed beads using brick stitch. The focal beads are my lampwork beads. Now, about my photography...................later. |
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| Portrait of the Artist as a Newbie Lampworker |
| Wednesday, April 19 2006 I am obsessed with COLOR. I am obsessed with GLASS. I am obsessed with BEADS. I have gathered (pun intended) all these obsessions together into one..........LAMPWORK. And, I added a new one for good measure.......FIRE. This blog is a journal of my adventures with glass and torch to become an expert lampworker. Come along for the ride. It will be bumpy. Lampwork is not a skill I can pick up in a few days, or a few weeks, or a few months. I started roughly six months ago and I can at last make a decently shaped bead with smooth, if not puckered, holes. I know, PPP (Practice, Practice, Practice or Practice, Patience, Perseverance) These are some of my first beads that were not drowned at birth but should have been. I kept them because i hoped to see vast improvement soon. Sigh!  It is a wonder I continued but I had just read Cindy Jenkins book and she made it look so easy I thought I could just whip out gorgeous beads in no time. How wrong I was. |
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