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!

Long weekend projects!

For the long weekend we went to Rocky Mountain House to get a bit of heavier work done in the forge at my parents shop. The forge is pretty neat and was built from two recycled brake drums from a semi truck that have been cut up and welded to a metal bench. I will have to include some pictures of it in the future. I have found over the last couple of years that I prefer using a coal burning forge to anneal metal rather than a couple of torches to heat larger pieces of metal(as long as the metal does not incinerate!). Where I am in the city it would be impossible to set up anything like that so I will have to continue going to R.M.H to make larger scale items that need to be annealed several times. Here are several items that we worked on over the weekend. Keep in mind they still have to be shaped a little more, we have to add patina  and perhaps add a metal background or make a stand to keep the item on.
I tend to like to frame the 3-d pieces with an etched background with color or patina, rather then make stands for them at  the moment. Although with the seashell looking piece I may make a copper stand for it after I finish shaping it and adding some patina.

The pictures aren't the best at the moment, as I just took a couple of quick snapshots!

The other work I did over the weekend was the complete opposite in terms of the type of metal work. As most of my customers know, I do a lot of wire work. Most of the wire work is in jewelry form, but I do some larger wire sculpture as well. I am 100% self taught in this area and I am always developing different ways of wire setting stones and doing sculptural work. Here is a couple of pieces over the weekend I worked on.

This next picture is a huge necklace I have been working on for the last week. I am hoping to put it in one of the well known galleries in Edmonton soon. It is sterling silver, prehnite and green quartz. I am still working on the prong settings for the quartz and still have to connect all of the of pieces together. Hopefully I will be able to finish the entire piece in a couple of weeks and I will be able to post a couple of decent pictures.

Last item we worked on was a couple of leather masks. Lately we have been making mixed metal and leather. Here is one of Tanner's new masks, It hasn't been coated yet, but it is looking pretty awesome. He draws out all his templates completely based on a line of monsters/aliens he has been drawing for the last 15 or 16 years.

He might add some metal tips to the horns! I will post some finished pictures the moment he is done!

Random things from the summer months...

We finally were able to take a class with Charles Lewton Brain. I had bought one of his books and a dvd a couple of years ago and met him in Tucson at the AGTA in Febuary. I had told him then I was hoping to take his fold forming class that year and everything worked out that we were both able to take the summer class. I am also posting a couple of picture of work we either did when we got back or completed at our studio.



The top picture is a awesome looking shell like creation on top of copper and the bottom has 3 layers of copper with copper flower and blue chemical patina. There are tons of other pictures on our facebook group too.

The End of the summer!!

I will post a couple of things from the various summer events I did etc. I had totally forgotten my login and password and for some reason it suddenly came to me at 3 am! so I wrote it down and decided to add a bit of pictures before I went to bed.


Here is our booth from the Canmore Art Festival. This was a beautiful outdoor show, with the mountains in the background.

Another great out of town festival was the Regina Folk Festival. I had never been to Saskatchewan before so we went through Llyodminister down to North Battleford to Regina, then took a different way back through Moose Jaw and Swift Current. I would really like to go back and check out some of the stops on the way back like the underground tunnels near Moose Jaw.



Here is a picture of our booth at the start of the show! We sold out of many of our popular pairs of earrings at the show! The Folk Festival was pretty awesome! We might be back again next year!

New mixed cuff line!

I recently started doing more leather work that is being added to my mix of other techniques I have used. I started doing fused glass over 2 years ago and I am bringing it back into my designs and pieces because it's great to display at all the outdoor shows we are doing during the summer.

The hand tooled cuffs started out as tooling hide which I cut, tooled, dyed and sealed. I then made the brass component (including the image on the brass) that is sewn to the cuff, I added a plastic base color to add another dimension to the metal and under the piece of raised metal sits a awesome piece of glass I fused in my kiln. The glass was shaped into a circle and slightly bevelled so it sits tightly in the brass setting.

The necklaces of this series are done the same way except I fabricated a simple small 3 prong setting that hold the fused glass. I like to curl the top of the prongs that are visible on the top of the necklace to add an extra layer of interest to the top.

The over all time to make a cuff that looks like this is close to 15 hours (if I was only to do this one cuff at a time) with all the waiting time for the glass to cool in the kiln, heat setting the plastic color, cutting/shaping the glass, adding the image to the metal, shaping and finishing the metal, cutting/tooling/dying/dealing the leather and finally attaching the components all together. I wouldn't do one cuff at a time I try to as much as possible to keep the price down to something affordable.

My inspiration for these pieces came after I finished the video game Mass Effect 2. The fused glass looks like little galaxies and the items look a little sci-fi or cyberpunk.

yawn

I don't feel like doing too much today... In under a month there is the gift show and it is taking us longer than usual to finish the product samples we need for the show and get all the media and photos up from the Golden Globes gifting suites we did. Hopefully, soon we will be able to have someone help us a little with the website as Tanner stays up very late updating it and then gets up early to go into work. On the plus side there is almost new media everyday where we are mentioned or there is a short interview available!

New media found!!

Found some more media that came out today mentioning me!
This is an article with one of the actors from Hereos with one of my belt buckles.
http://www.entertainmenttoday.net/content/view/903/72/

The is one like this available on my store for sale. It fits a standard belt buckle that allows you to change the belt buckle attachments.

I also found a short interview with Tanner and I in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0L5-aptN8

A couple of Videos from L.A.

Video for Secret room events that shows the items given to Gerard Butler- which included a pair of my blue cufflinks (posted above).


http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/celebrity_and_showbiz/watch/v19673051K6xMpDnB#



The video below shows the whole Secret Room experience. The opening photo shows Gerard Butler at the event with the show promoter Rita Branch wearing one of my necklaces. If you are interested in this green turquiose and floral necklace I can make one similar to it after I pick up some more green turquiose at the next upcoming big gem show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_IONKzGf2w

This other video shows a interview with Tanner and I at the GBK gifting suite with MBN.
This video includes the large piece that is being auctioned off for Haiti.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZApu6PLRZ8

Alberta Gift Show- By Hand Section

I am the artist/product of the month for the By Hand Artisan section.

http://signatures.ca/MainTest.html

hmmm well I never slept tonight!! I am WAY behind on getting things done and I have an interview on city tv in 1. 5 hours! so far I have almost all my anticlastic braclets done with blue pearls added to bring to Hollywood. For some reason looking at all my products lined up makes my (for the first time since I knew I was going to beverly hills for the gifting suites) VERY excited.

My copper anticlastic braclets are something I have wanted to do for a while. The have been slightly oxidized and have a matte finish (which Ashley did) and I attached freshwater light blue pearls. They sizing I think is perfect for small all the way to large wrists. The colors for this upcoming season are some of my favorite colors so I have been incorporating them into all my new pieces for the upcoming gifting suites!

I just finished a stunning 3 tone necklace made from turqouise, sterling silver, brass and 14k cocoa plate on sterling silver necklace. I will be putting up some pictures soon. I haven't decided if I am going to wear it to one of the gifting suites or give it to some high great celebrity. well time to do something with myself before my interview.

First!

I have started several blogs already and none of them have been updated regularly. :) This is really the first one that I am going to do, that just blogs about my projects as an artist. I started my small company in 2008 and I called it 'Paragon of Design by Skrocki' (that's me) or abbreviated to P.O.D. by Skrocki. When I started my business I mostly did some art/ craft shows, custom orders, online sales on etsy and sold to friends and family. Starting in January 2009 I decided to do the whole craft and art show thing full time (with school) and do several shows (sometimes 8 shows!!) a month. I have the help of my fiancee and sister to do the shows that are double booked while I refill products or do orders. Also my fiancee now helps with the majority of the physical work that is involved with doing metal work and even my sister is involved now with the creation of some pieces.
We have been insanely busy only stopping work a couple days a year to celebrate major holidays, but because of all our hard work our products have been in demand at many of the shows we attend. We had been slowly saving some of the money we earned through selling our products to do some sort of mass advertising. But a better opportunity came along, a chance to participate in some of the best known gifting suites in Beverly Hills, that honoring the VIPs and nominees of the Golden Globes. Since the majority of our inventory has sold out during the christmas season we had to make around 200 of our signature pieces to give out in mid-January at the Secret Room Style Lounge and GBK gifting suite. Since most of the metal work is completely done from sheet metal and wire the process of getting these items ready requires almost round the clock work to be done! Later on I will be posting the items that are going to be sent to the editors for the Secret room events style lounge and the items and descriptions for the products I am taking for the celebrities!