Silversmithing and jewelry class

I made a ring today in the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's intro to jewelry class--it's many weeks' worth of material crammed into two 6.5-hour long Saturday sessions. I'm learning lots of cool stuff--some stuff that I can't really use until I invest in some more equipment, but some stuff that I can use right away. It's pretty cool :)

(I of course had to texture my first ring with the traditional message a programmer displays for their first foray into a new language!)

Yarn!

Spinning! Yarn! I've made more of it with my drop spindle and it totally looks like real yarn.



From left to right: 2-ply wool (the dyed strand is from roving that came pre-dyed in those colors); Navajo 3-ply tussah/merino; and a swatch knitted with said 3-ply. I kind of want to make a knitted version of this hat from the 3-ply with some as-yet-nonexistent colorful/wacky handspun stuff for stripes, but I'll need to do some calculating first to make sure there's enough. I haven't yet decided what I'm doing with the 2-ply; the colors are kind of cool but also kind of terrifyingly retro. (I'm half-jokingly calling it "The Last Juniper" in my head--there's no good reason to reference The Last Unicorn, but the colors *are* pretty juniper-ish.)

Still haven't gotten around to dyeing this two-color stuff purple. It may need to wait until after the move.

New stuff in the etsy shop!

Tell all your friends! :p


purpleshiny.etsy.com

Oh man, found objects

The coolest metal bits ever are lurking around the streets of Somerville!



Do you think I should oxidize (darken) the silver on this one, or leave it shiny?



It figures, just when I've decided I have all the jewelry supplies I need for a while, I stumble across even more cool things. At least these ones were free :)

Spinning yarn!

I tried to learn how to spin yarn a few years ago and didn't do very well. Sometime last week, I stopped by Mind's Eye Yarns and asked for some basic wool to learn to spin with--and I managed to make something that mostly looked like yarn! No pictures yet, as I still want to dye it. But then I took out some of the roving that I'd bought the first time I tried spinning:



Oh my goodness, it looks a lot like real yarn! I'm going to get some more roving and ply together different combinations of singles--I find this particular combination a little too much like all the yarn I already own :) But yay, spinning is neat!

Finished projects, in the "Jewelry Inspired by Palimpsest" category

I tried to make these visually interesting in their own right even if you're not familiar enough with the book to know what they're alluding to... did I succeed?

Casimira earrings:





A more abstract November pendant:



(these are available at the etsy shop)

Pasta machine printing

I had the idea to use my pasta machine (which I've previously used for rolling out polymer clay) as a printing press. Ink a thin plate with a raised design, place it on top of a sheet of paper, and roll it through. If you click on the image above, you can see a sort of haphazard step-by-step sequence of the process I used. I'm fairly happy with this technique, although the rollers on my machine seem to not be exactly parallel. I may investigate alternate press approximations. (Maybe a vise would work? And a vise would be a useful thing to have around anyway for other crafts...)

I recently read Palimpsest and have a bunch of crafty ideas in my head because of it. It's a great book with lots of rich, visual language and interesting characters.