Sunday, April 17, 2011

A little note from me................

Stationary is very hot right now! They have cute trendy stores devoted to all that is papery goodness and I'm not talking about Officeworks.  Mum will confirm that as a kid, when we went shopping, my sisters would head for the toy department and  I'd nag Mum until we visited the stationary dept. I used to covet little notebooks, cute rubber erasers and pencil sharpeners.
Many years have passed and I still love stationary, so it was only a matter of time before that influence showed up in my jewellery.
This little notebook pendant is a mere 2cm by 3 cm.  It's a copper prototype but  I'm definitely going to make some more of these in Sterling Silver very soon.  Not to be worn while swimming, showering or singing in the rain!

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How do you pronounce Chenier?

Never mind - I'll just call it tube!

Week 9

I've pretty much finished my Nature assignment - ready to hand in next week. It's all assembled now. Here's a couple of pics:

Front View


Side view showing layers


Reverse with leaf texture
I'm going to clean up the edges a bit and leave it at that I think.
The family have critiqued it and think that I should've put a leaf texture on the top frame layer to match the back of the bottom layer, otherwise they like my efforts. I agree - I'd thought of texturing the top frame, a little too late mind you as I'd already finished it, so to go back and texture it in the rolling mill would have distorted the frame shape and size. Much as I love filing I didn't want to have to rework it all.... so it is what it is!

Tuesday in class, I had a hankering to make a hinge! I'd used manufactured tube in my assignment but  this time the lecturer showed me how to make some Chenier from scratch for hinges. What fun! I started with a bit of silver ingot about 1 cm thick and about 4 cm long. Rolled it down in the rolling mill until it was .7mm thick. Then forged it in a swage block and on the bench to form a 'sort of half tube'. When it was curled over enough, I started drawing it down until it formed a 'real' tube. The Lecturer showed me stick soldering to join the seam and hey presto I had Chenier! (even tho' I can't pronounce it!)

Top: The rolled out Ingot. Bottom: Finished Tube

 I cut the tube into small lengths to make a hinge but as I was shown a couple of different methods of doing this I might make a separate post later on with all the details.

Unfinished hinge experiments.
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Thursday, April 14, 2011

Hollow form Fun.

I ordered some1 mm brass sheet so I could try out some more hollow form shapes, similar to my week 4 efforts. It arrived this week.
Couldn't wait to get started on Wednesday. Pretty much the wall is constructed first then it is soldered to a slightly larger textured bottom plate. Then the excess is sawn and filed off, so the join doesn't show.
There must be a hole in it somewhere before the top plate is soldered on to allow the heat and gases to escape and avoid a hot metal explosion! So I measured out and drilled my holes for the chain at this point then soldered on the top. After more sawing, filing and sanding and it was all finished! Easy peasy :) Well, it's sounds easy but in real life it took me the best part of the day to do! Hopefully after I've done a few more of these I'll get my production time down a bit!


I'm loving the texture too. It's from a fibrous scrapbooking paper. Reminds me of Leather ;) Pin It

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Still going on that Nature Theme!

Week 7 & 8 !
I'm a bit tardy with these blog posts and the Tuesdays at TAFE are just slipping by so quickly.

I've still been working on the Nature theme assignment these past weeks. I've lined up and drilled all the holes and measured and cut the tubing to separate my metal layers and in the process was introduced to a new little tool - a tube cutting jig. Very handy little tool that is now on my wish list  (Ahem, note to my kids - Mother's Day coming up if you're reading this!)
Here's a pic of all the bits ready to be riveted together:
 


In between working on this we've done other tasks including an exercises in measuring and drilling and another sawing and piercing exercise. Funnily enough - I'm not finding these exercises tedious - they really are building up my skills so that these basic techniques become second nature. Hey, I even enjoy filing and sanding now! Pin It