Author Archives: cheyenne

About cheyenne

Custom jeweler & designer in Portland, OR

jewelry artist: shinji nakaba

This is my current favorite jewelry artist. Everything the guy makes pretty much blows me away. I LOVE the classical carvings and the use of unconventional materials (PVC pipe, epoxy, steel mesh, pet bottles, beer cans, the man makes a kick-ass brooch out of a plastic Asahi beer cap). I don’t see a whole lot of carving in jewelry.

[Agate, 18K gold] This was a ring that got chipped and returned for repair. The gold part is the repair. How awesome is it that the repair makes the ring even better than it was originally.

[Stainless Steel Wire Mesh, epoxy , coral]

Seashell, 18K gold (carved body ring)

When I was a kid I used to have these weird half-awake sensory dreams. Usually there was something impossibly massive in magnitude competing with something supernaturally calm or smooth. This translated into many different scenarios in my childish mind: A massive freight train screaming and clanging so loud about to blast through the wall of my room. Galaxies of unidentified hugeness trying to force its way through a hole the size of a pinhead. When I was young, the dreams really frightened me but as I grew older, I gained control of them and sort of had fun tripping out on them. They grew less frequent in my late teens and I had my last one my second year of college. I missed them at first but of course have grown used to not having them. Every now and then, something I see will remind me of the dreams, the weird feelings I had from them. Some of this guy’s carvings remind me of them but I really can’t say why or how.

Here’s a brooch that he carved out of a bit of pvc pipe:

I can’t stop posting images! Look at these pieces he made out of aluminum beer cans:

Ahhhhh, the rose ring. Sigh.

studio woes

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[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.)

pearls and excuses

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A few things. One: We went on vacation (!!) to San Francisco & Napa to visit old friends, drink a lot of wine, visit about twelve different parks (the toddler loves parks), and buy some pearls. Two: I got slammed with The Wedding Season. I am thrilled but also a little freaked; this is my first big rush. Yeeee! Three: True Blood. We just watched the final episode of the first season so I think I can get on with my life—well, at least until I get my hands on season two. Not having a TV for the past 20 years, and not having full access to one before that, has left me woefully unprepared for that most frustrating of plot devices: the cliffhanger. My brain pretty much sucks into a tight bead of anxiety and I am forced to start the next episode right now immediately ohMYGOD they just killed Graaaaannnn!

Anyway, ahem. I bought a few new pearls while in San Francisco, because I was just at the gem show and desperately needed more more more. Behold:

Yum. The two on the left are Chinese freshwater pearls and the one on the right is a South Sea pearl (from Australia).

Here are some more. All are Tahitian pearls except from the bright peachy pink (natural color too, by the way) Chinese freshwater pearl. They range in size from 9.5-11mm approximately.

I posted two new pearl rings on the Etsy site: here and here. I also have two new designs coming. One spare and modern and the other featuring (you will NEVER guess): roses. My oh my.

wax injector, revisited

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I finally got my wax injector and am using it and it works great and pink waxes have populated all the ledges of my studio like weird little fairies. But it wasn’t as easy as that.

Of course I had to put off my grand purchase until the new year because of (blah) taxes. So as soon as the supply company got back in the office after the holiday, I got them on the phone and ordered the thing. It came a week later packed in a box crammed solid with shredded cardboard worms. I applaud the repurposing of old boxes but I have to say that that shit is disgusting. They went everywhere as I tried to scoop them into another box; a hazy dust cloud formed over me like some sort of plague. I’m not kidding when I say that I had thoughts of all sorts of evil creepy airborne particles, namely anthrax. I’ve never seen it but I imagine it probably looks like gray vaporous cardboard. Eventually the machine itself was unearthed in all that packing material. I pulled it out, releasing another cloud of cardboard dust and splattering a new batch of dry worms all over the floor. Curiously, the amount of shredded cardboard that came out of the one box now filled two boxes.

But the wax injector. Oh yes: it had dials, it had toggle switches. It had stylish screw-down knobs on the top. I opened it up and peered inside to find … grossness. Greasy casting sand was packed into the crevices. And I do mean crevices; where there presumably should have been the neat edges of a cylindrical aluminum canister were tool marks and bottomless cracks packed with sand. I was, um, irritated.

[This is after I spent a good deal of time cleaning out the sand with a pick and washcloth. Also those dark areas on the bottom where the grinder missed are deep, and packed with sand.]

[Greasy casting sand. Ick.]

It looked to me that it was simply a casting job gone poorly (I know a thing or two about casting jobs—especially the gone poorly variety). Then someone went in with a grinder and halfheartedly tried to smooth out the sides but really only made it worse. I got some paper towels to try to clean out the sand. Then I got some cloth towels. The paper towels shredded and the cloth towels snagged up on the sides. It was an ugly scene and I was rather bent out of shape over it. I wanted to use it already. My concerns (aside from the fact that it’s not preeeettttyyy) were that the sand would clog the nozzle or simply exist in my waxes, which frankly, would not do. I do a considerable amount of carving on my injected waxes and having sand in them is stupid. Not to mention, it could mess with the burnout and casting. My conclusions: Sand = Bad (and icky).

I contacted both the place I ordered the thing from and Arbe (the manufacturer) itself with my hypothesis. Arbe was the one to get back to me (promptly), except they told me that it was normal to have some sand in the canister and just wipe it out. If it doesn’t come out, don’t worry because it burns out clean!(?)* Basically, they told me I was being a pussy; a little sand in an ugly-looking canister was NOT going to affect the performance of the unit. I sent back an email all: you have GOT to be kidding me. And the reply was, no, not kidding, but if I’m going to be That Way, they would send me a new unit to replace it. AND, the guy who was writing the emails would PERSONALLY clean out any sand that may be in my new unit before sending it. What a sweetheart. I told him, “You’re ON!” They shipped it out the next day.

So, I had to wait another week or so to get the new unit, which of course was packed in another radioactive haze of packing cardboard (it took me weeks to work up the gumption to lug all those boxes of crap home for recycling); I packed up the old one and they had the UPS guy come to my house to pick it up.

The new one is fine. It is clean, it is normal. It’s perfect. It heats wax and squirts it out a nozzle! I’m very happy.

* Seriously? If the casting sand burnt out clean in the kiln during wax burn-out, why didn’t it vaporize when MOLTEN LAVA (I mean, melted aluminum) was poured into the mold? Am I missing some crucial point here? Because it makes no sense to me.

bauble ring

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The first of the Bauble Rings. I constructed this out of sterling and set a tiny 2.3mm sapphire in the top. The ball measures just under 3/4 inch. I snapped a few photos out in the brilliant sun. It has been beautiful here in Portland these past few days; the sky has been deep blue, crocuses are blooming, there are tiny pink flowers sprouting from all the plum trees. It’s deceptively cold though and every time we take off for a leisurely walk, we come back with blue lips.

This is another one. The ball is more perfectly spherical and a little bigger too, a tad over 3/4 inch.

gems, rocks, dust, mud

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When I found The Guy With The Turquoise at AGTA I totally started vibrating, I was so excited. I probably spent an hour poring over every stone even though I ended up buying the three papers I picked up initially. I ended up with 100 grams of turquoise. That piece up above is so cool I had to get it. It’s going to be a monster ring, most likely; that thing’s easily the size of a peanut butter cup. It looks like some sort of infrared Japanese water lily pond.

My mom came in for the spectacle the first day and we met up with Alisha. We all sort of drifted from one huge fancy color diamond booth to another for a while before shaking our heads and trying to remember what we came for in the first place. The AGTA show is so freaking huge it’s hard to know where to start.

Winding down on the last day of the show. Note the strict business casual dress code. I was in jeans and looked more presentable than most of the buyers. I guess the suits come for the first few days of the show only. I come for the sales on the last day.

A godawful waste of pearls if you ask me. The lady went on about how long it took them to find so many matching pearls to build this wondrous monstrosity.

Aaahh, that’s much easier on the eyes. This is Empress Marie-Louise’s tiara. Originally it had emeralds instead of turquoises but it was purchased by Van Cleef & Arpels in the 50s, they removed all the emeralds, and had them replaced with Persian turquoise. The emeralds they reset in modern-style jewelry and sold off as pricey little nuggets of Napoleonic history. I find it interesting that the turquoises are really unmatched in color. I wonder if it was always so or if some of them turned more greenish over time.

Some of the booth folk were not interested in me taking photos of their stock (corporate spies are everywhere) but these guys didn’t care. Here are many many sparkling sapphires. There was a LOT of this sort of thing going around.

As the show neared the end, vendors were either brain dead or really chatty about their stock to people clearly not buying $13,000 stones. This guys brought some of his trapiche emeralds out for us to ogle. They are just so damned cool. Really intense green and so much clearer than you usually see emeralds.

The gem show is in Tucson so we stayed at my parent’s house out in the desert near Rio Rico. I snapped the obligatory out-the-car-window shot of the ominous clouds.

Joshua stopped the car for me here. The cloud shadows on the dusty mountains looked really cool. It started raining as we drove in to Tucson.

Since we’re big tough Pacific Northwest types, we walked in the rain in between venues (along with nobody else). I was amused to see this skate park built in the concrete drainage ditch. This is right near the Convention Center. Go skater punks!

geeky valentine love

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I don’t often get into heart or gear jewelry. Heart jewelry is usually too sappy sentimental and gear jewelry generally attracts too predictable a crowd for my tastes. The combination of hearts and gears, however, cancel out the sap/dork and make for some pretty damned awesome pieces.

They are made by a design house called Tjep that does everything from product design and packaging to interiors and building design. It’s all pretty decent looking stuff really, rather heavy handed on the laser cutting.

MORE GEAR JEWELRY BY LYNN CHRISTIANSEN

Her other stuff is even cooler.

rosie the riveter

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New ring in the shop! It’s made from three plates of silver riveted together (no solder at all).

It looks awesome when the sun shines through it; it makes little rose shadows on your hand.

In other news, I’ll be going to the Tucson Gem Show in a couple of days. It’s the largest gem show in the country, in the world possibly? At any rate, it is massive; the entire town of Tucson is descended upon and taken over by gem, rock, and fossil types. There are venues set up all over town, some typical convention-hall places or large temporary tents set up for the occasion but others are in various motels. The string of motels along I-10 transform into a crazy marketplace; people vending out of their rooms. You wander the halls, going into any open door. Beds are shoved up against the walls and folding tables are set up with lights and glass cases for the stones. You can see into the bathroom nook where there are always personal effects like coffee cups, makeup bags, electric shavers, toothbrushes, rumpled washcloths or towels sitting out. I always feel awkward when I see such things because I remember that they have been living in this room for the past week. They actually sleep in the bed underneath the table.

The goods range from dusty rocks and fossils or mammoth tusks to fat glittering diamonds and sapphires and rubies. There are tables piled two feet high with hanks of pearls. Buckets (literally) of lower-quality cut sapphires, amethysts, garnets, citrines. Some venues are just in parking lots and others have security guards, only letting certified in-the-business folks inside. These venues actually have a dress code, a thing that totally freaks me out since I have very little in the way of non-denim and t-shirts.

One of my favorite stops is the Flamingo Hotel lounge downtown where the Native Americans show their work. This is not so much a rock venue but rather a finished jewelry and artwork show. You walk into the hotel lobby and the light is dim, there are smudge bundles burning, wooden flute broken up with an eagle call here and there is playing in the background, and a bunch of surly old dudes loaded down with serious turquoise jewelry stand over their work. A lot of the jewelry isn’t really my style but some is truly awesome. It’s always worth checking out.