Finished wireworked or wire sculpted piece in sterling silver with prehnite and emerald

I had earlier posted some wire work pieces that I was not quite finished. I finished not too long ago and have added in a mix of prehnite and Columbian emerald instead of the green quartz I was originally going to add. I also did a small line of pendants that were similar in style to my large wire sculpted pieces and I have them on http://www.etsy.com/. The one I have listed is  http://www.etsy.com/listing/69707452/wire-work-abstract-heart-pendant-in that particular pendant has the same emerald and also contains peridot, my other favorite green stone. I used to be able to get my prehnite from http://www.riogrande.com/but unfortunately they no longer have the stones I am looking for. If anyone knows where to get the same quality prehnite briolettes or large stones contact me on this blog or my email mailto:paragonofdesignbyskrocki@yahoo.ca.


I love the almost glowing aspects of green prehnite, I have yet to see colorless, blue or white stones. Apparently there was a rare orange prehnite found in South Africa in the Kalahari Manganese Fields. I looked it up and found this website http://www.irocks.com/keyorange.html. The specimens on this site look incredible. I wonder what chemical made it orange color. I’m curious because I am still studying my gemology through the GIA http://www.gia.edu/and in my studies there is all sort of chemicals listed that give a certain color to each of the stones and what causes the variations of a certain stone.

Below is the piece I just finished made from sterling silver, fine silver, prehnite and emerald.

Leather books!

I am getting ready for many of my christmas shows that are focusing on more of my home and office items. Such as leather books!!

Deciding on the color

 Using my jewellry hydraulic press to help glue in fancy paper on the inside.

Leather masks in the background of my leather room!

Finished product! Awesome brass plate I finished making a week ago!

Booth pictures fro fall into christmas medicine hat!

I took some pictures of our booth after Tanner so nicely displayed everything! I wish I had taken the pictures with my camera rather then my iphone camera.

New postcards!!

We just finished designing our new postcards and hopefully they will be ready for our first christmas show of the season!!
Front

back

New items and tools!

I recently bought the bezel block or bezel punch and I can't figure out exactly how to use it. It does round prong and bezel settings and the tool has apparently been used for centuries by Italian goldsmiths. Once I figure it out I will put up some step by step instructions. I need to step up the pace while making bezels and prong settings so I hope that this will work. As a birthday gift from Tanner :), I got the Bonny Doon Brake Backbar and the Brake Blade set for making custom square bezel settings for wall art and belt buckles (that's what I will be using it for maybe later boxes).

I can usually never think of birthday or Christmas (or valentine's day) gifts other than tools I want to try out but don't really need them in my work space. From my sister and mother I received a new iphone 4. Which I immediately went and made a Iphone case, it turned out so well that I am for going to sell a couple either on Etsy or at the Make It Production Shows. I will also do a couple ipad and laptop cases!

I cut and formed the leather, tooled it with a cross on the front and an image on the back, added a cross I had made from copper and a loop at the top to tie around the strap. I dyed it a deep chocolate brown that really looks great with the aged copper and hand stitched it. I have a tool that is really basic for doing the stitching holes in leather but instead of using that I measured out the hold quickly and used my flexshaft to VERY quickly add holes. I am going to add a strap and a lipgloss holder to the new ones! The photo was taken with my new iphone 4. I never thought I would say this about a cell phone but I love this phone and all its apps!!!

Also here are some new belt buckles that are a little more affordable. For Christmas I will be bringing out a bunch of under $100 belt buckles, many of which will have matching accessories (cufflinks, pendants, earrings, rinks, etc) The buckles are covered with resin which gives a light that appearance to be shining out from the copper! I will be putting up lots of the new work as I finish it including the simple wood working pieces for the back of my metal artwork the moment I am finished!

Kaleido Family Arts Festival!

The weekend went pretty good!! We were set up at the festival and we had set up a small display in Bedouin Beats not too far away from our booth set up. Bedouin Beats has a clothing/jewelry/cd etc store up front with a complete dance studio in the back offering a variety of different dances such as flamenco and tribal fusion. I helped my sister pay for a class in Tribal Fusion so she could try it out and maybe we could do some sort of mixed photo shoot with her and some of the dance moves with jewelry, accessories and even a couple of masks in the future.


At the festival we met some pretty good artists, talked to some long term customers stopping to say hi and fellow metal workers stopping by for a quick visit. Another great neat experience was having so many people who either got items for gifts from us or bought items for gifts come up to us and tell us how much either they or the receivers loved the item! One of the best parts of the show is the cost of the booth for the traffic I got!! It is so nice to pay only $45 artist fee to set up over the high festival, craft and trade show fees! These type of inexpensive festivals can really help with buying supplies I wouldn’t normally buy so I can experiment on new types of projects.

Tanner’s latest large mask was finished in time for the event and sold also immediately! Sadly we never ended up taking a very good picture of it! Here is the finished mask which can be worn and hung on a wall for decoration. The mask was sold to one of the dancers from Bedouin Beats who bought it for her son as a Christmas gift. Below is the finished product.

I also finished some more rings!! A very long process! I included some pictures of the rings when they came out of the tumbler, when they were oxidized and then a couple of the finished products. Also below is another picture of a new wire wrap with a leather background.

I am starting serious preparations of my Christmas products asap. There will be a lot of wall art, icons and other unique décor for the hard to buy person. My father is helping me with part of the production of some of the simple wood backings to the wall art, as I don’t know very much about wood working tools, finishing and the woods themselves. I will probably post a couple of pictures of the production in the next couple of weeks. Next year I will start a little earlier and hopefully commission my older brother who is a skilled carpenter to help me with one of a kind mixed wood and metal jewelry boxes and 3-d wall art.

Trying to get ready for the weekend...

We are going to be at a small art festival this weekend and the last festival we are doing this year! You can check it out at http://artsontheave.org/tag/kaleido-festival/ . I am hoping for good weather this year  as last year the wind was unbelievable! We had products blowing down the street and everything was covered in dirt. We couldn't reuse most of our earring and pendant cards from the event. With the cards we use to hold the items I have found they last for up to 12 or 13 uses, but after that event we have to attach all the products to new cards (as well as clean up all our products :) ).

I am trying to finished some more rings for this weekend, which are my shield style copper rings.

These pictures are ones with a small ring band. I will hopefully put up a couple of pictures of the LARGE shield rings with the thick patterned bands in a couple of days.

I usually only make rings every couple of months because of the extremely long process of making the rings, but I have a order from a new store that wants to carry a couple of rings in Kimberly, British Columbia. The store is called the Gilded Goat and from what the store owner told me, the store sounds really unique and filled with tons of treasures. I will definitely have to stop by and see the gilded goats on the ceiling next year during festival season in B.C.

I am also completing another ring order in this bunch of rings for a store in Edmonton! I will post the pictures of the items as soon as I complete them and they are in their store.

I got a new tool recently for around $200.00(shipping not included) to help me out with the production of ring shanks. It is the Jump Ringer™ Finger- or Toe-Ring Mandrel Set.

I bought this tool thinking that it would fit my old style Jump Ringer System. But sadly it doesn't! The chuck does not fit the end of the mandrels... It would have been nice for the website to say the mandrels would not fit in that particular style of jump ringer system.  So I rechecked the online store where I got it from and a new chuck system was going to cost almost $100 without shipping. Instead of buying this new Jacobs-chuck winder that fits 1/2" mandrels I went to Princess Auto and bought a key less chuck for $11.99 and made my own turning device for under$30 CDN.  The sales guy at the store looked very skeptical that I even knew what a Jacobs keyless chuck in the first place and appeared to humor me by showing me two different styles and where they were found in the store. It probably didn't help that I got Tanner to ask the salesman then interrupt him and ask myself :). Next time I will just ask myself immediately when I enter the store as I really hate wasting time looking for things...

Now I can do a higher amount of the simple ring bands( although not specially shaped bands for the shield rings).  Since we do almost everything ourselves we are constantly looking for neat tools that can help us keep the costs down for our customers and allow us to spend more time on the design process of our creations. I noticed after that I needed an additional item(four sided coil holder) to use the saw blade for my flex shaft. I think I will have to skip on this for a while and just hand saw them.

 I bought the Knew Concept Jeweler’s Hand Saw in March 2010 and it is just an excellent upgrade from a standard jeweler's saw. The saw itself is very light weight and very stiff. This two features help keep the blade from breaking (even cheap practice blades take longer to break). The blade fits into a screw tightened top which allows for quick release and replacement of the blade when I am doing highly pierced pieces. I was noticing the regular jeweler's saw was getting too difficult for me to use, mostly because I would have to tighten the top and bottom so tight to keep the blade intact that I would strain my fingers (especially after a long spree of wire wrapping). Anyways I am a little off topic of the ring mandrels from Jump ringer, but this is a great tool to use as an alternative to the saw attachment to use with a flexshaft.

Anyways.... I could probably talk about every tool I own and it's +s and -s but I am getting tired!