I started this project for two reasons. first I need to be more consistent with my hammer work and I wanted to see how closely I could raise a matching pair of vessels. Secondly I need to make some samples of repousse wine cups that embody a new direction in my ideas about decoration on these cups.

One disk has been started the other has only the center point marked with a punch. The disk is hammered in a depression on a stump from the perimeter toward the center.  This stretches the metal. I started with 5″ disks, 126 mm with hopes of raising a 60-70 mm beaker.

This photo shows the first round finished, the second round started where the roundness is restored and the finished second  round.

This is what it looked like after the third round which was struck with a ball peen hammer.  These three rounds were done without annealing but to continue I must now anneal.

I lightly set the bases on the inside so that I would have a reference point from which to begin raising the sides.

I marked the bases at 50 mm and raised the bowls on my pipe stake held in a vise. The bowl on the left is raised  the one on the right is still bowl shaped. The hammering from now on is all on the outside of the vessel. Top and side views below.

I crimped the second bowl  to see if there was any advantage to a more angular raising.

After raising the difference was minimal, only about 5 mm difference between the pieces.

I set the bases on a flat round stake and went for another round of raising trying to close the beaker a little faster, this photo shows how much I am trying to move the metal on my pipe stake in the vise.

The bases were set again and another round after annealing.

Another anneal and round of raising, the vessels are very close  to matching measurements.

At this point the bases are near where I wanted them to be but the tops were still too wide and not tall enough.

I planished the bases to about a 30 mm height  and raised the vessels closing them more the rest of the way.  The beaker on the left is ready to be annealed and the one on the right is almost finished for this round.

At this point I planished a little higher and closed the tops some more.  Another shot of the two pieces in two stages, the one on the left is ahead of the one on the right.

At this point I began to planish lightly after raising and before annealing,  I wanted to lower some of the hammer marks so that later planishing didn’t have to be so heavy. I made one more round to close the tops some more.

Planishing the tops after the final closing round made the beakers more circular. They had been slight ovals before I planished them.

Yesterday was the first day of my Spring classes at FIT, I took the beakers to show Gennady  who said I’d done a good job of raising them.  I told him about planishing lightly after completing a round of raising before annealing. He said that, with copper, light planishing was okay in most circumstances because copper is a pure metal. It is not a good idea to do that with  sterling silver,  which is an alloy.  The sterling surface could get “stretch marks” and there was a danger of causing the metal to layer,  with sterling it is always better to work on soft metal.

I took this short video of me annealing one of the beakers before I trimmed them.  Annealing happens very quickly when you heat from the inside  with a big torch. I also marked that when the green flames turned orange the piece was annealed. I think the flames were telling me the oxidation was finished and the metal had relaxed. You’ll hear the quench near the end of the video.

The beakers had already been marked with my surface gauge to a height of 65 mm which is where I trimmed them.

Thursday, January 28th 2010

The day started early and cold. It was snowing, but because the roads weren’t yet holding much snow, we thought it would be all right leaving for New Jersey in the tail end of the rush hour.

Once we had crossed  on the Outerbridge Crossing the snow had stopped, as we got further on the Garden State Parkway it looked as if there hadn’t been any snow there at all. Colman and I were the second and third visitors to arrive.  This arrangement of plants greeted us as we entered the greenhouse.

Anthony Silva, Colman and Joe Silva.

A greenhouse cat found me and rode on my shoulders for the first walk through the main greenhouse. She felt like a kitten but they said she is about 12 years old.

I like this green orchid, the blooms form a ring around the pot edge making a wreath under a canopy of bold, broadly ribbed leaves.

There are a great number of green cymbidiums in bloom, this end of a bench that went around a corner and about a third of the length of the greenhouse.

This is a species paphiopedalum from Vietnam. The flower is in its last days but still has a remarkable presence above netted leaves.

This plant is in full bloom, a lot of flowers in one pot.  A close-up follows this photo.

This little dendrobium was hiding in the very back of the greenhouse with the cool masdevallias. It is a dendrobium,  in a 3″ pot, it’s my favorite of all the plants I have seen this trip. If we had a cool enough place to grow it we would have taken it. It was picked up by a couple that spoke with a German(?) accent.

Joe talking with some of the other visitors.

Our friend  Ron arrived as we were finishing up looking and buying plants.

A couple of visitors found this bulbifilum growing in a fern root basket on a high shelf.  This is another favorite.

Tuesday night we went into the city to see an Opera at the Met in Lincoln Center. The tickets were a wedding gift from my friend Abdul who lives in England.

We arrived early enough to get something to eat before curtain time.  I was struck by all the trees wrapped in lights on Broadway and Columbus Avenue. This is looking downtown toward Columbus Circle.

We discovered a new space just south of Lincoln Center, it is the David Rubenstein Atrium. I think it also serves as a place to buy tickets for  performances in Lincoln Center. There are two of these living plant wall pieces in the space that seems to run all the way through the building from Broadway to Columbus Avenue.

It is a pleasant space, interesting music is playing and the acoustics are comfortable without echoes. People were gathered here  reading, talking and using their computers. I suspect there’s WiFi here too. We ordered hot sandwiches and tea which was brought to us for an unhurried, light meal before going to the Met.

The ceiling is punctuated by these oval light wells. The mural on one of the walls seems to be made of sound absorbing felt, it is pierced by windows through which projectors were streaming moving words and images on a huge screen on the opposite wall.  We couldn’t see what it was other than to feel the change of light and color being reflected on us while we ate.  There is a lot of stage lighting hanging overhead, I can only assume that the space is occasionally host to musical or film events.

Approaching  Lincoln Center  from Broadway.

We saw Stiffelio, a not often produced opera by Verdi. It is a beautiful production, it was a real treat to hear live orchestra and voices without amplification.  Stiffelio will be broadcast on the web this Saturday at 1:00PM EST from the WQXR web site.

A parting shot of the Met Lobby as we left.

We had to walk up to 72nd street because construction has closed the downtown platforms for the  1 train, a walk of about 7 blocks.

This is the new Alice Tully Hall.  I was surprised. It is a suprisingly large, cantilevered building.  There’s a dance studio that  hangs below the main part of building with a huge window facing Broadway. The construction is glistening, it looks like magic.

Electrified trees trail up the median of Broadway and  up Columbus Avenue.  It gives this part of the city a festive air.

Yesterday I went into the city to make a delivery so that I would be able to accompany Colman to the Silva Open House I New Jersey. As I was leaving I walked down Fifth Avenue toward 23rd Street. It was a beautiful day, temperature in the 40’s, the air felt like Spring wearing a Winter coat.  It was about a quarter past four, twilight was beginning as the sun moved lower in the West.  The towers around  Madison Square were beautifully luminous against the sky.

Getting closer to 23rd Street I looked back and saw the Moon rising between two towers.

The pieces were annealed. I worked on the inside of the bowl (bottom part of this container) with the hook hammer, starting at the rim and working my way down to the base with closely spaced hammer strikes.  About a third of the way down I switched to a sand bag and continued working toward the base.

I began to close the top some more.  The hook hammer was used to harden  and round the dome from the inside,  then I used the raising hammer and stake to close it all the way to the rim.

When I finished. the rims of both the bowl and its cover were practically the same diameter, they balanced on each other.  I annealed them again.

I wanted  to  push the sides of the bowl out some more and close the rim so that it would fit inside the cover.  I used the surface gauge to mark the inside with three rings to guide my hammering. I set the base again to work harden the edge.

Then I began to hammer the middle part of the bowl from the inside on the sand bag.

In the left side of the  following photo  I have just started to raise and close the rim. When I finished raising and closing I gave the whole outside a light planishing  to smooth out the sounded surface. Then I began to work on the cover (top part).

I closed the top half of the top with my raising hammer on the T stake and I used the hook hammer to push a shoulder out from the inside starting in the depression on a stump, finishing on the sand bag.  The surface gauge was used to mark a height on the bowl and I used a pair of dividers to mark the rim of the top.  Both pieces were trimmed with shears.

More shaping and regulating has to be done because the symmetry is not regular.  I also want to solder sterling wire rims to both pieces before I can start the decorative chasing and repousse.

Here’s a comparison shot of the coupled piece at the beginning, middle and the end of this entry.  More to follow as this project continues.

Yesterday I began to work with 2 copper disks that I bought last Monday. I want to make a container with a separate top, roughly pear shape. I shaped the first disk that was 5″ in diameter the way Gennady showed me to start the teapot. I made three passes, two with my raising hammer and a third with a filed down ball peen hammer.  It was such a success that I started to take photos when I began with the larger 6″ disk. This is the small disk after the first set of hammering.

Here’s picture of one of my small stumps carved with the depression I am using for this first bit of shaping. The stump is about 8″in diameter.

Here’s the 6″ disk before I began to hammer the edges.

I don’t have a broad raising hammer like the one I used in  the FIT studio. The metal really crumpled under the narrow raising hammer. This is just the second or third time around the edge. 

Working in toward the center it gets more wrinkled.

This is what it looked like after hammering it a second time  from the rim to the center.

I used the ball peen hammer because the raising hammer left the surface rougher than it would have been if I had a broader raising hammer, there was still a lot of metal that was not work hardened. All of this happened before I needed to anneal, the ball peen hammer made it smoother and cleaned up the shape. This method gave me a practically instant depth of 36 mm and stretched the diameter 10 mm.

I annealed both pieces.  I took the large disk and hammered  a rough base from the inside. Then I put a steel pipe into my vise and began to raise the vessel by hammering on the outside.

Here it is with the sides hammered flat and up toward the rim, it gained a modest 6.5 mm in depth.

I  tried to stretch the small disk some more by raising it in the depression again.

Here are the pieces just before annealing.

I set the base on the large dish and began the third round of raising on the steel pipe.

I began the third round with the smaller disk on the round end of my stake set at an angle in my vise.  It was very hard to keep everything symmetrical without a set base.

When I finished it and it wasn’t too badly  off center.

After annealing I began the fourth round. Pencil lines were drawn on the the large bowl (bottom part) to help me control the pitch of the sides. I had gotten the symmetry a little skewed.

I found the center on the top part of my project, marked it with a punch and lightly scratched circles with a compass so I could see  where to strike and keep the dome rising and closing evenly.

The bottom after the fourth round.

The top nearing completion of the fourth round.  I had to switch to the flat side of my stake to stabilize the  metal while I worked on it, it moved too much on the rounded end.

Here they are together after the fourth round.

After annealing, I sharpened the base and planished the lower third of the bottom part before raising and closing the top section further.

It was a struggle getting this into an even form.

Fifth round complete.

I used my new hook hammer to reach inside and round out the top. It was too small for the stake which was distorting the dome.

Sixth round fiished on the top, it is still asymmetrical, it will take some more work to straighten it out or find another solution.

I had to be more aggressive with the bottom, it was time to raise the upper portion of the bowl into a parallel position.  The top edge really began to curl in the process.

The open ends of both pieces are about the same diameter now.  I want to close the top of the bowl a little more and  give the dome a bit of a neck. Shaping will be interesting.

Here’s a shot of the last three rounds, the pieces are stacked to show how they changed each round.

January 4th I was in the city to deliver a box to Ellen, it was a brilliant, very cold, bright day. I passed by Madison Square on the way back downtown. The new glass tower has been finished, joining the Met life and New York Life towers in the skyline around the square. I have photographed it as it was going up in previous entries. Eventually I will know its name.

I am continually amazed by what my simple Canon camera can do.  It’s just a 12x zoom,  if you could see the detail captured in the original shots instead of these cut-down-for-the-web versions you might be surprised. These were taken from the street level on the farthest side of Broadway at 24th street (where it crosses Fifth Avenue).  The leafless winter trees have made a dark veil through which we can see more of the buildings than we see in summer.

On Monday ( January 11) I went into the city to see some antique silver that was being auctioned that afternoon. Walking up Broadway  to the Radisson from 23rd street I passed by this store selling costume jewelry.  I wonder why I never see anyone wearing stuff like this.

The displays are decked out with more than a person would wear at one time or maybe they would wear the whole set. I can’t imagine that there are factories producing these things in multiples and that it all goes somewhere.

These pieces me feel that even my large brooches are quite modest.

I was taken by the decorative elements of the old hotel  remaining in the Radisson Martineque at Broadway and 32nd Street.  After seeing the silver show on the second floor I took the stairs down to the lobby. The mosaic floors gave me a feeling of what it was like in ‘Old New York’, perhaps a gentler time when architects worked more closely with craftsmen to make something that felt richly finished, polished and solid;  something that made you feel secure and cared for. The garland of leaves passes through the corners of the border in three different ways. 

The entrance has been renovated, the architects tried to preserve most of the mosaic decoration of this passage.  Here are a shot of the large border.

The vestibule has a large medallion with dolphins its center. Part of the medallion has been lost to a renovation sometime in the recent past.

The large border is partly covered by newer wood work, I like seeing the large scallop shell in acanthus leaves at the end  of the scroll. Probably what pleases me  most is the simple graphic nature of the design and too, if you know me, these are my colors.

I’ll leave you tonight with a composite shot of the staircase I took coming down from the auction showroom.  This construction speaks of an elegant past, lit now, with tiny halogen bulbs.

I delivered a box to Ellen around 2:00 this afternoon and then headed downtown to go to Pearl River to see about a journal that I thought would be there. When I got out of the R train on Broadway at Prince, the first thing I saw was the Armani AX store clad in its sexy scaffolding.

Across Prince street, the Victoria Secret Store was being changed to Pink.

Walking west on Prince I was seduced by exotic cupcakes in the windows of a booth that has had many owners in the last twenty years, the new tenant sells sandwiches, pastries and lots of seductive, stuffed cupcakes.

A couple close-ups of some beautifully made desserts with novel names. I wasn’t going to eat one on the street, these look special enough to require full attention while sitting in a comfortable chair with a good cup of coffee.  Maybe even a pastry fork and knife.

Further down Prince on the North side of the street  I passed these foot level windows that look down into  a restaurant. I remember when the basement space was first converted into a restaurant some twenty years ago.  It was always high style. I think the first restaurant was called  something like ‘Tea’.

I stopped in at the Apple Store which was very busy.  That building was our post office when we lived around the corner on Mercer Street. It has seen a couple of tenants before Apple redesigned it. Moving down Greene Street, I passed by the SOHO Building where the sidewalk has a huge brass and glass map laid into the sidewalk. The granite sculpture was new to me, there is a steel sculpture at the south end of the building too.

Design within Reach struck me as being retro,  50’s retro for sure. Those clocks are a design crime.

This golden ceramic Coffee set was in the window of Armani Casa. Handles and spouts are of interest  at the moment. The Jade topped box is nice too.

Sometimes walking through construction on the street feels like walking through an art installation.

The windows at Kiki de Montparnasse look like like they could be either a Christmas Tree or a New Year’s Party left over. The diode lights are much brighter in person than in the photo. There has been a great proliferation of the tiny bright lights all over Soho.

The Sicis mosaic showroom always looks like a stage set.  There’s a life size bathtub in the window that is shaped like a huge high heel shoe, couldn’t get an unobstructed shot of it.

This one of the biggest cleanest mirrors I’ve seen. The copper sink and Brass faucets mounted on it are immaculate too, the hardware seems to float in air with its siamese twin.

The Swarovski Store has a large Cafe on its Mercer Street side.  It’s a nicely laid out store, I didn’t go down stairs but I did take some time to look at the crystal offerings, I was surprised that a lot of the medium and larger pieces were more expensive than comparable semi precious, natural stones. This wall is dazzling, but when you pull crystals out of the drawers, it’s very hard to see the colors, it all goes dark in the area immediately in front of the display.  I walked through the store and exited on Broadway on my way to Pearl River. (Which  didn’t have the journal I was looking for in stock.)

I stopped into Pain Quotidien to pick up some brioche for breakfast  and continued along Broome Street looking for Sur L’Table.  I was in the wrong place.  There are some new buildings on Broome Street in the west. The sun was beginning to set and this new glass tower was lit dramatically in the pale winter sky. The new towers all have pieces cut out of their top edges and sometimes boxy additions that stick out of the main part of the building.

The lower building further  down Broome had interesting, neatly netted scaffolding on its roof.

I was standing on the corner of West Broadway.  The tree outside the Cupping Room was wrapped in lights. The ground floor store of the building across the street was once the center of a controversy, it sold bullet proof clothing as if it was regular wear.

The sunset seen from the ferry on the way home was spectacular.  Those are container port cranes  between the Statue of Liberty and the bow of the Bayonne Bridge.

I know it’s late and the show has closed. The New Landscape was only open for a week from the 10th to the 18th of December. There was a really well attended, pleasant opening reception and I have a batch of nice photos of the event and people who attended. The  first and last photos in this entry were taken by one of the people who work at the Canal View Gallery.  Colman and I arrived early, I’m in the center of the photo talking to Anja, Matthew Jensen and Colman. It was an interesting show of photos, digital prints and video by four artists,  Georgie Friedman, Matthew Jensen, Austin Kennedy and Rufus Lusk.

Colman, Anja and Rufus Lusk.

I think this is the owner of Canal View. I didn’t get to talk to him so I don’t know for sure.

Georgie Friedman , her website has photos and clips of her videos. I especially like  a piece called Spiraling Water.

Georgie and Rufus

Two visitors in front of one of Austin’s installations.

Russell, Anja and Neal.

More people arrive.

Colman talking with Jesse Baker of NPR.

Matthew Jensen

Anja and Austin.

It’s getting more and more crowded.

Gene, Peggy and Colman.

Kat, Taybin and Russell with one of Matthew Jensens’s installations behind them.

A final shot of the crowd catching me with my camera in the air.

Thursday was my last silversmith class for this term. The studio was filled with students getting their evaluations in wax carving and others were hard at work at the back benches finishing projects for their finals. My intentions were to work on regulating the form of my subtly lopsided teapot and to make a hook hammer for my studio. I spent $12 getting a piece of tool steel and picked up another bar of stainless steel just incase one type of metal would be more suitable. We had tried to make one last week but the enormous nail (9″) had a casting flaw and broke in the process. While I waited for Gennady to finish his grading I worked on an end of the tool steel bar that I thought was the most likely choice for my hammer. I also worked on the teapot; while it was in the pickle after annealing, I put a stump with a vise on it close to he torch I knew we would be using. David, one of my classmates, needed a stake on which he was going to tighten the lip of this pot. He had polished a small piece of tool steel and Gennady showed us how to bend it with hammers in the vise. It was a short piece of steel but it had to be bent to match part of the pot’s contour, it also had to have a ‘foot’ that would keep it from working into the vise while it was being used. My steel bar was much thicker but Gennady used some of the same cold forging to give the hammer part of its preliminary shape. After that he put it into the vise and began to heat the bar selectively. He heated the bar in a small place and with pliers clamped on it, bent the bar, he moved the heat along the bar and bent it more. After a while we had a hook and he turned the bar around to make the right angle for the handle part of the hammer. Once that was done, he forged it into alignment and began to forge the handle end into a taper. Here’s a photo of Gennady finishing the handle end on the anvil.

Here’s David with his pot.  I’ve been in three of these beginning classes and I have never seen anyone attempt something so complicated. Watching the progress of this pot taught me about reshaping stakes to the job at hand. Even though he’s not quite satisfied with it, he has also given the pot a nicely planished surface. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Here’s Kim (we were on the Riva tour together) with her pot, it turned out much larger than she intended.

The early really cold weather has forced us to bring in the camellias, some are in the greenhouse and this one is in the kitchen (for now). I decided last year that I would prune them more severely to limit their size and hopefully get them to fill out. I also fed the plants more than I have in the past. This is Tama Electra, a samurai type single camellia with a white edged flower.  In the past it hasn’t had more than one or two flowers,  trimming and feeding it has made it bloom with more flowers than we have ever seen on it. These flowers are from a second flush.  There are lots more buds on the secondary branches.

Here’s the gangly bush in the morning sun by the kitchen door.  I’ll trim it a lot more after it finishes blooming.

This morning the sun was so low that it lit a tile we have hung in a back corner of the kitchen. Here are a couple of photos.

A visit to Riva was organized by the newly started Jewelry Club at FIT. Our small group went to the factory just after Thanksgiving. I wasn’t able to take pictures inside but here’s a photo of our group. Katie is on the left, Brian our Jewelry Tech at FIT , is next to our guide Maria  and Kim, one of my classmates in the silversmith class, is on the right. 

It was an eye opening tour. I began to see just what it takes to produce quality castings with perfect finish in truly vast numbers.  We saw wax injecting, molds in all different kinds of materials, we saw model making printers that work from computers,  we saw a flask leave the  burn out kiln and be put into a casting machine. There were finishers  working on wheels, a room with tumbling and vibrating polishers, there were machines that made chains, stretched wire  and some that produce ingots of silver in all kinds of shapes. In other rooms heavy machinery fabricated pieces with pressure, cutters or computer controlled machining and shaping. New technology is near traditional methods everywhere in the factory. There are people there using lasers to fill porosity in pieces while other lasers engraved hallmarks inside finished  pieces. It was an intense, interesting and exhausting to see all the steps a piece of jewelry goes through before it is on the retail shelf. The thing that impressed me most was that there is constant inspection and responsibility attached to each piece no matter how small it is. Every piece is catalogued and inspected as it moves through the many steps to completion in its own pigeon hole in a tray of identical pieces. The visit has left me with a lot to think about should I ever need to manufacture in  huge quantities.

The numbers of pieces was the other eye opener. I still saw jewelry as something that is made by hand in reasonable quantities (what ever that means). Riva makes thing in the thousands of pieces, sometimes the tens of thousands. I couldn’t have imagined that the market was that large. But if you stop to think that if a store is a chain or has outlets across the country each store has to be supplied with the same merchandise. If you have 50 stores, which is probably a small number, and each store has to have an inventory of 5 0r 10 pieces of an item, that’s already 250 to 500 pieces of just one item. If that item is a neck chain with 30 or 40 large or decorative links, the number of links becomes near astronomical for just a few stores let alone a hundred or two. Each piece of metal is practically hand made and finished with machine assistance.

We were in a part of  Long Island/Queens I had never seen before. On the eastern horizon I could see the elevated BQE, a place from which I have seen a lone green Citi Bank tower, a tower whose shadow was now very near where we were. Here’s a view of Manhattan  from a road near our subway stop.

The subway station had beautiful stained glass lights all through it. Here are some photos of the windows, that even on this overcast day were glowing brightly.

After looking at these photos I noticed that each light had a letter  somewhere in the composition.  After a while I realized that there must be a whole alphabet at this station.  We were in the middle of the station and the windows are all lettered with the center part of the alphabet, M,N, O, and  P.  If I ever get back there I’ll look for the other letters.

The Teapot , part 6 starting the spout

I redesigned the spout on my first drawing and made a flat pattern for the spout. Gennady had me cut two pieces out of copper foil that  I then annealed.  One of the pieces is to remain flat  so that I will have a pattern to use when it comes time to make the  silver spout.  I began to shape the other piece of foil into a spout shape. I won’t be able to give it the curve  because the foil does not have enough metal to move like the silver spout will.  I used a delrin mallet on a sand bag to begin the shaping.

Even though the metal is thin and flexible  dramatically becomes more difficult to bend after it has been worked on just a little. I had to anneal it a couple of times, which happened very fast, to get it to this nearly closed shape. Gennady told me I would have to remember the way I struck the foil getting it to close as I will have to do the same with the silver later. Closing the seam wasn’t

easy, we found this little bar type of stake in the tool closet and  put it into a vise. It took me a while to figure it out, I found that to  close the bottom part of the seam , I had to use the little crook at the end of the stake, tapping the foil into the concave space.

Once I finish shaping the pot body I will trim the shaped foil model until it fits like I want it to fit on the pot,  I’ll retain the pieces I cut off and subtract them from the flat pattern I have reserved. The spout is much longer than it will be when it is finished on the pot. The length is necessary  because it will be packed with sand when we shape the curve and we need to be able to close the end tightly. I don’t know the procedure or how it will happen, but that’s next term.  Only one more class left this year.