Jewelry Blog

 The Kinetic Project is finally finished. My fingers are pretty bruised from working on linking the jump-rings into a chain, and filing tiny pieces of metal.  I'm not 100% happy with how the piece came out, it strayed far from my original design but overall I believe it looks visually similar. There are a lot of things I would do differently if I had access to the studio, but I'm happy with how it came out considering my limited resources. 

For the Kinetic Project I created jump-rings, using copper wire wrapped around a wooden dowel. Unfortunately I could not saw them off due to having no saw blades left, so I improvised and used wire cutters. If I later had access to the studio again I would sand down and solder every other link to make the chain stronger.   I also epoxied a jump-ring to each "charm" as I could not drill into the pieces. I am not concerned with the archival aspect of this because I plan to redo this project with new, deeper etchings. 

 For the Kinetic Project I once again used the etching method to create the "charms" for the piece. I believe it was somewhat successful, however I was struggling to clean these as much as I wanted due to a shallow engraving, probably due to the acid bath being used throughout the semester. I am also struggling to drill holes in the pieces without having someone to pierce the metal before drilling. I attempted to use a regular screw and hammer to create a recess to drill in, but the screw was too lightweight of a material to achieve that.  I plan to attempt to attach the initial jump-ring with epoxy and and then proceed as usual.

 For the Kinetic Project I was immediately drawn to the idea of a mobile. But a mobile isn't considered jewelry because its not wearable, so I made it wearable. I came up with the idea of a wearable mobile, a bracelet. The movement in the piece will be due to the chains holding the etched "charms".  The piece is about the tale of persephone and hades, utilizing different idols from the story to create the feeling that the wearer is controlling the story. I'm excited to use the etching technique in this piece- I feel it will lend itself well to the communication of the piece. 

The piece has been etched, cleaned up, and ready for the pin-back to be attached. Overall I'm happy with this piece, I feel the message is conveyed well, and I appreciate how clean the etching technique is.  I do think in the future I would like to utilize the etching technique more, especially combine with the vector drawing style. I do wish I could find an efficient technique for cleaning the recessed areas, But so far using my steel wool tipped Dremel tool has been the most effective.

For the iVote project I settled on a final design utilizing the tree stump design from my initial sketches. For this I designed a vector in indesign and intend to etch it using the acid bath. In my mind this project lends itself best as a series rather than a one-off piece. Ideally I'd make the tree stump pin, and a bar necklace with the phrase "if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to see it, did it really happened?". However for this project because we can't use text I'll just be sticking with the tree stump pin. Below is the vector I will engrave.