Just a couple of shapshots of the finished necklace (18K pendant with opals and diamonds). Boy am I happy to have this finished and on its way to its owner.

(Not exactly an evening gown, I know.. I was in the studio! Covered in polishing grit!)

This project started as a big batch of broken and un-loved jewelry with a lot of decent stones in it. So, I pulled all stones and sent the metal into the refiner. Then I went about designing a new piece using up all the old stones. At first the idea was maybe a brooch..

But then it changed to maybe a pendant.. A butterfly maybe?

No, too much; the butterfly pendant was way too fancy. We needed more everyday wearable—like only 20 diamonds and a handful of opals can be..

Every-day wearable. And still cool. Check.

The wax of the piece. I proposed to carve the wax base for the diamonds and build/solder on the bezels for the opals. Because my last experiment with bezel-setting in gold using 14K was painful, I decided to go easy on myself and use 22K bezels. Opals are soft stones, and 22K is a dream.

The piece freshly cast into 18K gold (+ a little bit of polishing). There is a lot of gold here.

The bottom is cool.

Et voila! The finished pendant.

Soldering on all the tiny bezels was not super easy. I spent a lot of tedious hours making the bezels seamless on the piece and sanding/polishing between the little spokes, all the while listening to Dan Savage’s podcast. Now I know a lot about people who have sexual fetishes for snorting things up their noses (like gummy bears).. or outie belly buttons. I like to think I’m a richer person because of this.

That middle diamond, for size reference, is 5mm in diameter. And all those little diamonds are 1 point freaking 3 mm in diameter (cough cough). (Mine eyes..)

The finished back. I like how the center stone pokes down so starkly and pointily on a back that is all soft curves and swoops.

Ronin and I spent an evening not eating any dinner (her) and dancing to various youtube video songs. Here are some winners..

Okay. This is one of my favorite all-time finales of a movie hands down point blank period and that’s final. Maybe it was the movie, but maybe it was simply the wicked edo-period tap dance. A great number of movies could be made better with a full-cast tap number finale I believe. (It starts out pretty cool but seriously gets extra fucking awesome around 1:20.)

And if you are a major Japanese movie geek and happen to have a fetish for Kitano Takeshi, here’s a little treat: Beat Takeshi vs. Shamisen. If you like this, you should seriously follow this thread (I live in a small world evidently: I’ve NEVER seen anyone rock on a shamisen until now).

Here’s another dance number mash-up I’ve watched about a million times by now:

Two words: CYD [and] CHARISSE. My god. Can it get any better? This video makes me tear up at the end actually. It’s kind of embarrassing (and it’s not because of MJ).

Do you like Bollywood numbers? Here are a couple to watch.

My daughter (she is two) is into dance and has a special affinity for ballet (would you believe..). Sometimes on hard mornings, we watch a bit of Giselle to take the edge off The Shrill. This has to be my favorite of the Act 1 variations (of the billions out there):

I don’t know why I like the hop-hop-hop-twirl-twirl-twirl bit so much (1:00) but wee little Gelsey does it the best out of all the little ballerinas on the internets. It makes me sad that the only recorded version is in so crap of shape. Bugger.

I have some new stuff coming soon.. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a ring that I found last night while browsing the internets and which I think is about the raddest thing ever:

God I love it. The quality of the fabric rendered in gold is awesome and I love the light patina the gold has——makes the wrap look like soft and unbleached like raw linen. The artist is Kevin Coates, and the piece is titled Yseult (Isolde of Tristan and Isolde fame). Here’s what he had to say about it,

A few years ago, I received one of those intriguing little boxes in the post which usually celebrate the remote cutting of a wedding-cake. Upon opening it, the box, bereft of nuptial crumbs, cradled instead a lonely baroque pearl, shyly featuring not one, but two, ‘nipples’. The charming accompanying note from a fellow jeweller, well-known for her wonderful work with pearls, said that she thought that I may be able to think of something to do with it. It remained fallow, but not forgotten, for some time, until the idea for this ring about Yseult (for Wagnerians: Isolde) occurred.

I bisected the orphan gem in order to liberate the two wanton nipples, and although the refractory qualities of mother-of-pearl differ from the superficial aspects of pearls themselves, I managed to find a good colour and nacre-density match from which to carve the segment of face.

The power of drapery to conceal and reveal, to reserve and to promote, is immense – here I also wanted it to stifle and restrict, to reflect Yseult’s fatal love for Tristan. That was a passion destined never to be celebrated with its wedding cake… SOURCE

I really want to start expanding my carving to include other substances rather than casting wax. Unfortunately, I fear change and much of my hesitance is due to stress over not knowing what tools to use, what to try to carve first… All dumb stuff I can probably solve in three minutes with google.

In the meantime, I’ll just continue idolizing other awesome carvers out there and dream of trying my hand someday. Soon, I think.

This ring came into being when Ghezal sent me a pair of stud earrings she never wore. The pearls were petite Japanese akoyas, and too small for the pearl ring designs I had (I typically use Tahitian and South Sea pearls, which are from a much larger oyster).

I dinked around with some ideas and even carved something that seemed good in my mind, but actualized in purple wax, it was kind of ugly. Then Ghezal said she wanted diamonds too and sent me an old diamond cluster cocktail ring to disassemble. Nothing like a passel of diamonds to sparkle up one’s imagination, and I reworked the design into more of an art deco inspired piece. She also casually mentioned she wanted it two-tone: white gold where the diamonds are and yellow gold for the band part, which at first freaked me out but it turned out to be not as hard as I thought it would be and of course, it’s pretty much awesome.

I love how this ring turned out.

[14K gold, sterling silver, diamond, and lapis rose-motif pendant.]

My sister in law’s family is from Afghanistan, a part of the world renowned for its intense blue lapis. Her father gave her some pieces that he had carried over from the old country (there’s more to the story than that, but maybe she can tell it sometime) and she had me make a few pieces. This is a pendant using a stunning tablet-shaped piece, about 17×23mm. The diamonds are recycled out of an old froofy pom-pom of a cocktail ring.

This piece was a challenge for me, not so much technically but mentally. I had never worked constructing gold before, nor had I done gold AND silver together. I have always been too nervous to construct using gold because of the waste; gold is just too expensive these days. But I got over myself and actually with this piece, I managed to be creative and had very little waste. Also it turns out that soldering gold is a dream come true, especially if you are accustomed to soldering silver.

Here was my design rendering.

I’ve just finished up my last convo of the evening and I just wanted to plant a wet beery kiss upon everyone who took time out of their lives to not only look at my work, but send me messages telling me how much they liked it! I’m totally overcome, I tell ya. Anyway, thank you all so much. You all seriously made my last couple of days!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about: dude. My moment of fame.)

[Current studio. My IKEA 'workbench' with benchpin clamped on, my stone-setting vise, and elderly laptop for Important Studio Internetting, i.e., streaming This American Life.]

[Other corner with shelves o crap and my soldering station.]

My studio situation is melting down. Studiomate #1 just bought a real live house of her very own that has an adorable little garage about to be converted into her very own studio with french doors and perhaps a skylight. I’m not jealous. Or bitter. Our current landlord has chapped the hide of studiomate #2 one too many times (or perhaps once was enough) and so we decided to give the place up. So… My options are thus:

1) Find an awesome little place, not too big, not too small, nice light, roommates or none, secure, comfortable, internet-capable, walking or biking distance from my house. And cheaper than the place I rent now. Is this really too much to ask? Craigslist seems to think so.

2) All of the above with room for two and split it with studiomate #2. Again, Craig is not being very helpful.

[Studio design I cooked up in a fever of builder's excitement. Siding would be corrugated metal and salvage cedar siding or palette wood. I know the roof is thin; I hadn't decided what to use yet.]

3) Build a studio in my backyard (see above). With all of my free time. The fact that we rent our place sort of puts a soggy damper on this idea. It would be difficult to move anything we built out of our backyard without removing a tree, squashing half the garden, and dismantling the fence. Not to mention it would probably be a little heavy.

[Interior layout.]

3) Modify a prefab shed, shipping container, build on a trailer (like a thing you pull behind a truck, not a camper) into a studio. The same issues with the fence dismantling, garden squashing, and tree killing still stand. It would be less work but a lot less pretty than my adorable little design above.

4) Buy a boat, put all our stuff in storage, and sail to Mexico. (Don’t laugh—I’ve done it before.)

Pretty! Pretty!