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I've been working away on my wax carvings in my spare time. Cast pieces take several months to turn around, so these pieces should be showing up in my shop sometime in February. In the meantime, I'll tide you over with some photos of the work in process.
I've gotten the bell carved to its three-dimensional shape here. I still need to hollow it out, though. I've been whittling wax in front of the TV in the evenings. That's my idea of fun!
I loved this raindrop shape so much that I decided to keep it this way - smooth and beautiful. Here I've sawed this in half in preparation for hollowing it out. I'll solder it back together after I cast it. Solid designs pretty much always have to be cast in two pieces and soldered back together.
I bet you guys are wondering what happened to me. All I'm going to say is "Christmas orders."
See you all when I surface...
I'm on the Etsy Metal blog today - the second interview down. I've had a lot of fun playing along with the Project Runway challenges - can't wait for next season!
I took a wax carving seminar a few weeks ago, and my inner sculptor is dancing for joy. I haven't really sculpted since I picked up metalsmithing two years ago. Yet I've always found three dimensional art more intuitive - even as a kid, when other kids were drawing, I was creating worlds out of play-doh in shoeboxes. Time just seems to fly for me when I'm sculpting.
For the moment, I'm sketching up ideas and whittling away like a mad sculptor. Once I'm happy with these, I'll hollow them out and cast them in silver. I already have a perfume bottle necklace in the works, which I turned on a wax lathe. I'm really excited to see what comes of it all. You can definitely expect to see some new pieces in my shop in the next month or two!
This week's Etsy Metal Project Runway challenge was to create a companion piece to one of our previous challenge pieces. I tinkered with a series of Modernist designs, and finally decided on this one - two stylized hearts in sterling silver with a garnet cabochon.
My Two Hearts necklace is a smaller, more delicate companion piece to my eye-popping Mod Daisy necklace, which I created several weeks ago for the Create a Character challenge.
As I was finishing this necklace last night, I had ee cummings running through my head:
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
It's always a good day if you have ee cummings running through your head, right?
For those metalsmiths who doubt the strength of my organic pickle recipe, I present Exhibit A - my stainless steel crockpot. No, your eyes do not deceive you, the organic pickle has eaten through the stainless steel. It seems to have worked particularly well just under the rim, where the metal is completely gone. How insane is that?
I'm now heating my pickle in the microwave. So far so good! And as a bonus, it saves an enormous amount of electricity...
This is just a small snippet of one of the three, count 'em, three long lines that I stood in yesterday. Outside. In the hot sun. For two hours.
So what was all the excitement for? Were we waiting to meet Angelina and Brad? Oh no, this minor riot, complete with security, a ton of little kids running completely wild, a camera crew from Fox News, and an amazing number of attempts at fraud (apparently punishable by a huge fine) - this zoo was the line for the swine flu vaccination. Aren't you sorry you missed all this fun?
But what the heck, I've now been immunized for both the swine flu and seasonal flu. Which, apparently, is worth more than gold at the moment. And it only cost me $10. Well, and those two hours of my life which I'll never see again...
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