One step closer...

One step closer. I put the window in the head of the ring (so it will let some light into the stone) and off to the caster it went! And when I get it back all I have to do is clean it up and set the stone (easier said than done!) But I think it will be a very cool looking engagement ring. And I love it when clients says things like... 'this looks amazingly excellent!' Now that's a good response :)

Final Tea leaf Earrings...

These are the final earrings. I have to say... I think they actually look like leaves! I know my pain in the ass client says he likes them (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE) but he's not convincing me.

NEW model of the engagement ring...

okay... this is the second attempt at that engagement ring (you remember... the last one gave me a nasty blood blister so i had to kill it... hahahaha! okay, so it really didn't happen that way, but we will pretend it did.)

the orange line is about where the metal will fold over the stone. and the orange square is where i may be cutting a window out. i'm waiting to hear from the client if he wants the window or not.

but it's slowly coming along!

2nd pair of 24k earrings

i'm making a 2nd pair of 24k earrings. these are modeled after tea leaves. they are not quite finished, but i thought i'd show you how they are coming out so far.

oh the things i make!

soooo... i am making a pair of black onyx earrings for a little old lady client. about the size of a nickel. and do you know what they will look like... come on, i will give you one guess...

NIPPLES!

yes... i'm making a pair of ear nipples. oh... just shoot me! the things i will do for money :)

killed it!

uck! been working like a dog on the engagement ring... and it died :( it's sooo ugly that i can't even post a picture of it!!! basically, when i was all done building the model i put the stone in there... and the culet (sharp point at the bottom) was right at the bottom of the head of the ring!!! UCK!!!

so i thought, seeing it was a model, i would solder a liner in it to add more metal under the head... and you know something... i thought to myself 'i should just stop, make a new one, and make a mold of this one, you know, just to have it.' BUT NO! why didn't i listen to myself. well... it's a mess now :( i found out you can't really put a liner in something that has a ton of solder joints to begin with.

soooo... i've started it over again. soon you will see a final product.

but the lesson of the day... YOU SHOULD REALLY JUST LISTEN TO THAT LITTLE VOICE!!! KNOW WHEN TO STOP!!!

ouch!

so... i'm working on an engagement ring. in the process, i managed to get a giant lovely blood blister!!! but you can see the ring in progress (along with my blood blister!)

finished 24K earrings

Well, here they are. They are VERY organic.

I ran into a few difficulties working with it, if you want to know what they were, just ask.

24K Leaf Earrings...

So... this is a posting to show how I'm making earrings for my friend Sal for his mother's birthday gift. The earrings are made out of 24K gold, which is not usually used for jewelry (it's too soft). But he wanted them in 24K, so I'm doing it. And it's proving to be a fun experiment. Soooooo... here are the steps.



This is the loose 24K grain that I purchased.


I had to melt down the grain to make the sheet to cut the basic shapes from.


This shows basics of dapping out the shape (not finished yet)...


And here is another rough leaf...


There will be lots more to come with these earrings... I still have a few things to figure out. But if anybody has any questions on how I'm doing something, just ask!!!

finished wave...

This is the finished wave pendant. One is in 14KY and the other in Sterling Silver. (They look a little different from the green wax a few posts ago!) I'm driving down to the shop tomorrow to them off (there are 7 in total). Keep you posted on what they say :)

a possible engagement ring...

This is a possible design for an engagement ring. The shaded areas are the metal, the white areas are neg space (cutouts)... the top would have one center stone with multiple small stones set around it (to create the idea of a larger stone... very traditional antique.)

Sun Goddess Pendant

I'm working on a Sun Goddess Pendant. At first I thought we were going to have an art nouveau figure around a center sun, but the client wanted a simple sun with flame like rays. One picture shows the orig sketch that the client decided on and the other is a rough wax that I started carving.

The piece will be made of out yellow gold with random set warm toned stones on the center and the rays. OOOOO... very warm and summer-like!!!

I'm just waiting on a final go-ahead to finish this puppy!!! I can't wait to post it to show you all what the final piece looks like!

a couple new sketches...

Well... I have a couple of engagment ring jobs going on. This one is for a nice, simple, clean lined contemporary ring. He liked lots of angles and lots of lines... I tend to agree :) There is nothing like a nice contemporary piece!!!

In the sketches, the ring has a red stone in there (we aren't sure of what type of stone will be in there, diamond, ruby, sapphire... we're still working out the budget.)

Wave Pendant...

Doesn't it always figure! I slave for days and weeks and months on different pieces of jewelry... and what gets noticed... this wave pendant that I made for a buddy. Nothing insanely special, sterling silver, textured (wavy) outside and a smooth wave shape on the inside (see attached picture). Well, she was down the Cape and low and behold the owner of a totally old school jewelry shop and the owner LOVED it! LOVED LOVED LOVED it! Soooo, he placed an order for some. And if they sell the way he thinks they will, he wants to talk about matching earrings, maybe a bracelet... who knows.

But it is still nice to get noticed. So the pictures show the waxes I carved for the pendants (the heavier one is in silver and the thinner is for gold). To get these done as quickly as possible (to get them to she shop by next week, so they will have a few weeks of summer in the shop on the Cape) I carved the waxes and sent them off to a casting house in Jersey to make a RTV mold of each of them (RTV means Room Temperature Vulcanized, which means it's a rubber mold that cures in room temp, unlike regular rubber molds that you would have to basically bake) and then they will shoot the waxes I need (5 silver and 2 to start with) and cast them then send them right back to me. I should have them by Tuesday or Wednesday, give 'em a polish, and I can bring them to the shop by Friday. Lovely!

The Summer Winds

'The summer winds came blowing in from across the sea...'

This is the kind of night that makes me wish I had my '86 VW Cabriolet again. The kind of night that I want to drive around with the top down on the car, a hoodie sweat shirt on, through the back roads... back roads that I am not sure where they lead... ahhhh getting lost on a night like tonight would be so lovely!!! Fire flies everywhere :)

I was standing out in the backyard with the wieners and it is so lovely out. The strong, warm and humid breeze rustling through the trees. The moon just visible through the scattered clouds. Oh! How much nicer can it be?

Honestly, it really doesn't take much to make me happy.

wiener muscle...

Just had to show off the boys... by the pool... in their new muscle shirts from the Black Dog on the Vineyard. My lovely Auntie Diane and Uncle David picked 'em up for my little men.

I'll just let the pictures do the talking!

a pit in the road :(

well, i should always know enough that when i set a time table to finish my work... i should just double it.

i had been working like a dog on my wax models recently (see a few postings prior to this for images) and i had 6 of them cast. well, the casting company FIRED them! completely over heated the metal! when you over heat metal, it burns out the alloy. when there is not enough alloy in the metal, it creates pits. and when there are pits, tracey is a very unhappy jeweler :(

what i would usually do is re-carve the models (and i may do that with one of them) but seeing a few of the models are so detailed and took hours upon hours (one of them took me nearly 2 days) so i cannot do that. well, tomorrow morning i have to get up around 5.30 in the a.m. to catch the early train into town. seeing i'm teaching right now, i have the opportunity to use their tools... there is an amazing tool called a laser welder (i don't own one, because it's about 30k for it) so i'm going to attempt to fill pits to bring the model to a point that i can have a rubber mold made from it. so i have to do this before class begins. ugggggg.

so i am off to bed early. but i swear, by this weekend i will post some new pictures!!! promise!!!

i'm in love with a strippa...

And that strippa is me! This weekend I did the long awaited Pole Dancing Intensive Bootie Camp!!! Myself and 2 of my Ho's (yes... this is how she referred to us... and Wendy, the instructor, was the Queen Ho) took the class.

We showed up and were completely shocked when our instructor met us in a trampy cop outfit. She took us into her 'costume' room... and told us to put on something that we would not usually wear (which I have realized I have become a conservative surf rat looking chickie over time, so anything shorter than my knee is daring for me) and we were all quite shy about being seen in our knickers... but trust me, by the end of the class, we all got over that.

After we put on our dancing boots (they had about an 6 or 7 inch heel, a 2 or 3 inch platform and to top it off the heel was clear acrylic) she had us sit and watch her do a dance... and oh what a dance that was. She told us to watch her like a man would :) hehehehe...

Okay... so basically, this was not just a pole dancing class... oh no it was not... it was a full crash course in exotic dancing! We did floor dancing... wall dancing... chair dancing... the basics of stripping... AND YES OH YES, THE POLE DANCING! She made us all repeat 'THE POLE IS MY FRIEND.' And you should see the bruises from me slamming my legs into the pole the wrong way... but I earned those bruises! Oh... and yes, I GOT UPSIDE DOWN!!! It was hard, my upper body is killing me (it's hard to pull yourself up!!!) but it was so worth it!!!

And at the end, Queen Ho had each of us do our own little dance (ha!)... I won't share all the dirty details, but I will tell you I ended spinning on the pole and hit the ground as the song ended... like I planned it or something! Ha!

Overall, other than the amazing day of dancing we had... we realized by the end we were all comfortable hanging out wearing almost nothing. The level of confidence it brought each of us was amazing. Honestly, when I would usually be fixing my clothes to hide things like, oh, my ass cheeks hanging out... it didn't even phase me... or any of the girls. Not to say that I would be wearing my ho clothes outside... but it's good to know that I can. I totally recommend this class for any woman that happens to live in the area... http://www.gypsyrosedancing.com/index.html and if you don't live in the neighborhood she'll have her idiots guide to pole dancing out in January. And yes, there is an instructional dvd and you can buy your own pole!!! And they come down in the matter of minutes and nobody needs to know :) I feel like this is the new version of the woman's empowerment classes they had in the 70's!

So, as I walked to work thru the financial district this morning... wearing my normal clothes, bruises over both legs, pole burns on my arms, floor burns on my legs, whole body aching... I could feel this evil little impish grin come across my face just thinking to myself 'I know something that you don't know.' I honestly feel like I was in some kind of a chick fight club yesterday, and I'm wearing my scars and muscle pain as a badge of honor. I feel amazing!

I just hope I can hold onto this feeling.

Oh... and for those who I told I would bring my camera and take pictures... Sorry... I'm not that comfortable yet :)

use your imagination!!!

Here are a couple of the waxes I have been working on. So basically you have to use your imagination (the ring will be in red gold and the bead in white gold.)

The ring is modeled after a coccolithophores (the little pink ball) which is found in the ocean. There are 3 sections on the ring to set diamonds (or other stones) in to create the little hubcap pattern.

The bead is modeled after a echinoderm, a stereocaderis to be exact. The long wavy lines will be set with diamonds.

Both pieces are part of some new designs I'm working on. As I said before, I don't want to give up too much information. But hopefully you can get a smidgen of an idea of what I'm attempting.

working my a** off...

Well... I've been a slacker on updating this, but I've been working like crazy at my bench. I'm working on some new designs (top secret... shhhhhh... if you tell anyone I'm going to have to kill you.)

So, most of my recent work is being done in wax. This is for a few reasons...

1. Metal is still high (it's dipped a smidgen since gold and plat hit an all time high, but it's still freekin expensive.) So wax is fairly inexpensive... very little waste :)
2. Most of the shapes are fairly organic, so carving wax is much more fun than doing it in metal.
3. If you screw up wax, you can just melt more on OR just throw it away.

Anyhoo, I'm still being somewhat secretive about the designs... and the idea behind them. I don't really want to give too much away. But I was hoping to attach a few images (you see, green wax blobs won't give away too much, leaves a great deal for the imagination) but I cannot find the cable for my camera right now. Oh well, maybe later :)

But more to come very shortly!