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.

new photos on the website

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I made this a while ago but only now got around to photographing it. I got the pebbles from Pebble Beach, near Ano Nuevo on the California coast. There is a sign that says “Please do not take the pebbles,” but seriously how could you not? The whole beach is filled with these tiny perfect colorful pebbles that would pretty much turn anyone into an obsessive compulsive. As soon as we got there, I fell to my knees and spent the entire time sifting through them, running them through my fingers, putting them in my pocket…

piles o rings

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Pretty! Pretty!

roses are silver, roses are gold

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I’ve been on a rose carving kick lately. This is the most recent one I’ve done. It’s my current favorite. My newest ring is always my favorite. This one I carved freehand (i.e., no sketch beforehand, no measuring, no plans, etc.), which worked just fine since it’s not exactly a complicated design.

This is another recent one I did freehand—just started hacking away at a scrap of ring blank. I think I started on the actual wax a couple of years ago but never got farther than blocking out a size and width; I don’t even remember what I intended to carve.

So dainty!

So not! This is a massive, honking, behemoth of a ring. It took me so long to carve that I felt like casting it into silver would have been ridiculous; $5 worth of silver in a ring that took me 20 hours to carve. Just how do you price stuff like that? So I had it cast into 18K gold (happily back when it was around $400/ounce). It’s really over-the-top but I love it. A big snarly rosebush for your finger.

carved rosebush ring, boulder opal in 18K gold

The stone in it is a boulder opal that I bought from a couple of dudes (brothers) who own and work their own mine in Queensland, Australia. While I was admiring his stones, one of the brothers entertained me with bawdy miner stories. He joked about how his brother (who was off getting lunch) was a total wuss when it came to snakes and spiders (seriously, who wouldn’t be; the number of deadly poisonous beasties that creep and crawl across the continent of Australia is staggering) and every night, having passed out after drinking his weight in warm canned beer, the wuss brother would find himself desperately needing to get up in the night to pee. After lying in agony in his cot until he couldn’t take it anymore, he would proceed to wake everyone in the tent with his swearing and flashlight flashing and banging of his boots against the ground manically attempting to dislodge any deadly scorpions or spiders. Then, lightning quick, he would dash outside to the nearest tuft of grass to relieve himself and fly back to his cot and be in his sleeping bag like his ass was on fire. The other brother laughed himself hoarse telling the story until finally the wuss brother returned to the booth with a couple of Indian tacos, eyebrows raised wondering what was so funny.

I’m thinking it would also be totally awesome to have little 3-5 point diamonds set around some of these bands. Maybe 5 or 6 stones bezel set. Course I need to learn how to set (faceted) stones…

Actually learning to set stones is totally my goal for the next few months. Except using the word ‘goal’ makes me feel like I’m on a job interview for an entry level position at some massive financial firm being asked by a doughy middle manager in an ill-fitting Structure suit, “What personal goals have you set for yourself?” or “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Those are the two lamest questions ever and I always hated them. Probably because my answers were always along the lines of: “Goals? I don’t need no stinking goals,” and “As a rule I do not plan more than a week in advance, but I can tell you now that I sure as shit don’t see myself HERE.” Sadly I never did answer honestly to those questions and I always got hired in the end.

Anyway. The point of my post? Not a team player. Also: likes roses.

oh haiti

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[Market St., Port-au-Prince, before and after. Image taken from here.]

I’m going to contribute $10 to Doctors Without Borders with every purchase from my Etsy shop. If you buy something, you will receive an email confirmation that a donation has been made in your name. Thank you.

pantone color of the year: turquoise

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Pantone 15-5519 (i.e., turquoise) is color of the year! I can handle it.

frustration

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I must stop forgetting my pieces in the pickle overnight. It eats up all my neat little solders, which then turn brittle and snap apart. Maybe my pickle is too strong? Maybe I am just an idiot.

A per usual, my lameness makes my life harder: I had to resolder the same points no less than three different times after leaving this pair of earrings in the pickle overnight (and each pair has four different solder points).

falling leaf earrings in sterling silver

[Nice dead plant, by the way. Go me!]

My point: TWELVE SOLDER POINTS. The pain.

Good thing I have such a kick-ass torch or else I might have had to kill myself.

wax injector

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My next major tool purchase is going to be a wax injector. Yes, bask in the glory. Naturally I launched an exhaustive search for the cheapest and lowest-tech out there and came up with this:

stuller mini wax injector

It’s tiny! It’s cute! It’s… missing a lid. You have to inject up. How do you adjust the pressure? How do you keep dust and gross studio debris out? I’m so confused.

Then I found what I had in mind:

It has a hand pump to pump in your pressure. It has a front injector so you can use both hands to keep your mold together and steady. It has knobs and dials and lights sticking out and, LO! Is that a toggle switch on the left there? The dumbest part of course is the fact that nobody seems capable of showcasing their product with the correct aspect ratio. Probably one dumbass marketing dude posted a squashed image and everyone copied. It’s disconcerting and dulls the pointy parts of my brain to even think about it. Luckily, I’ve seen them before and they look a lot more like this:

arbe not so mini wax injector

Correct aspect ratio. The red is kick ass and I would order it in a second if I didn’t need an air compressor to run it. It also has toggle switches.

Now I have to figure out what wax I need. I’ve been looking at Kerr “Super Pink” wax, which says that it is supposed to be the most carvable (I need to do additional carving once I shoot my waxes) and the wax I’ve used in the past has always been very goopy and sticky, gumming up my wax tool and making things hard. I also need to have a vibrant or darker color in order to see the details. The only trouble with the Super Pink is that it does not say that it is very flexible and I have very tricky molds with pieces that pop out the top and vent out the sides that produce lacey waxes with crazy sprue paths. I practiced with my studiomate’s wax injector and it took me a LOT of tries to even pry a ring out of my mold without tearing it to bits. Her wax seemed pretty flexy.

I don’t know if any jeweler types read this but I’d love to hear recommendations. There are so many wax options to choose from.

As my Christmas gift to the Internets, I present this:

Arbe 110 volt Mini Wax Injector with Hand Pump

It’s the Arbe 110 volt Mini Wax Injector with Hand Pump. PLEASE COPY THIS IMAGE FOR YOUR WEBSITE. You have my express permission and endorsement.

UPDATE on wax injector here.

the mustache

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After visiting a couple of the craft bazaars around Portland this season, I have to say that this year’s design meme prize goes to The Mustache. Mustaches everywhere. On pencils, on t-shirts, on jewelry. Cephalopods came in at a close second but the mustache rules.