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Here are a few shots taken in the back yard. The tropicals are responding to the cooler night time temperatures. Begonias are blooming and the anthuriums are looking very fresh with lots of new flowers.  The red anthuriums are a new hybrid that I found in Scituate, Massachussetts in August.  The pinkish  ones are very purple in person, that plant came from Home Depot a couple years ago. It is a constant bloomer but it has really put out the flowers in the past couple of weeks.

This is a hybrid names Sara, the flowers are enormous. If they get pollinated and fruit forms, the spathe will turn green and look like more leaves.

I’ve forgotten the name of this begonia.  It has incredibly large flowers.  This is the first time it’s had more than one umbel.

A composite shot of a small part of my anthurium collection.

It’s plum season and time to make tarts.  These have a modified rich tart pastry and a layer of chopped walnuts under the plum quarters.  This is just before they went into the oven.

I didn’t remember to take a picture until we had eaten half of the large one.  This is one of my favorite things. . .

The colchiums bloomed last week.  It’s a pretty nice clump of bulbs.

The saucer was annealed, then I started to lower the center by holding the rim on the wooden dowel I had shaped over the weekend, striking the center edge with the flat head end of my planishing hammer. That put it down a little but not enough to raise the rim so it could be picked up  from a table easily.  I have an oak log that  has a slight depression in it and thought  it would be useful with a large repousse tool.  I hammered that around the depressions edge but it was putting the center down with a curved slope.

Then I realized that I needed something much larger and felt I should have found the flat end of the wooden stake sooner, it was much more effective at moving the silver where I wanted it to go. It was struck with a large rawhide mallet so I wouldn’t damage the shaped end.

The depression wasn’t sharp enough yet. I taped the saucer to a steel block and chose the largest nail punch in my collection. It makes a circle when it is struck like a chasing tool. I set an edge of the punch on the chased line at a slight angle and struck, then I straightened the punch vertically and struck again in the same place, the edge was finally down where I wanted it and the slope up to the leaves was gone.

After completing the circle with the nail punch I took the saucer to the flat top round stake and used the planishing hammer to flatten the center of the depression.  While there, I stamped my mark and a 925. Then I took it back to the log with the depression and used a mallet to even up the raised rim.  It’ll go back into the pitch bowl now so that I can start the detailed (final?) chasing.

The Teapot

I took my new flat top round stake to class to set the base in the teapot. Gennady showed me how to set the base with a mallet. Other times when we set the base, we have always used a hammer. This is the piece right after Gennady finished  demonstrating, the base is being set on the left side of the bottom, you’ll see a shadow where he used the mallet to put a sharper angle against a divider marked circle, on the right side there is no shadow.

Here’s a close up of the inside after I finished the round, there are marks where  the edge of the stake has been hit a  little off  the mark.  We used the mallet to flatten the  bottom too. Eventually I will push the center up to make a foot on the teapot and base will not be flat  or chased.

From here I began to use a hammer and a mushroom stake to raise and close the sides from the break in the angle up to the rim of the bowl.

Finished with that round.

It was time to anneal the piece.

At this point we needed a new stake,  Gennady picked out a large t-stake that had a cut back end, didn’t get a photo of it for this entry.  We had to re-grind the back end because it had a chip right where I would need to use it. This stake was necessary because it had to fit into the angle of the base so that I could begin to raise the sides to the proper height.  It took about 3/4 of an hour to grind, smooth and polish the stake’s end.  I had to polish out old hammer dents too for a space that was just over an inch from the end.  I wanted to use my raising hammer  so Gennady showed me how to strike and how close the strikes had to be to each other.  When I got this far he wanted me to use the mushroom top stake  to continue to the edge. Class was over  a little while after I began to use the rounded stake, this shot was taken just before I began to use it.

This shot shows how much more was raised on the round stake before the class ended. The diameter has grown another 1/4 inch, it measures 8 1/8″ or 206 mm.

The Saucer

At home I have been working on the saucer. This is where it was when I stopped  a few days ago.

Here it is today after about four more hours of repousse work.

As you can see it continues to warp as I work on it.  It is strange, nothing like this happened with a copper plate and the Snake Pit plate when I made them. I probably should have  raised the rim a little to stabilize and shape it before I began to apply the decorative work.

Here’s the topside after I cleaned the pitch off of it.

While the plate was in the turpentine, I thought I might need a wooden stake to help me shape the rim.  I made this one from a closet pole.  I set the base a little flatter  with the flat top iron stake and and put my mark along with a 925 stamp on the bottom of the saucer.  I hope that will be enough of a signature for the set. I still haven’t figured our how to mark the cup.

I used the mallet to flatten the saucer a bit. It is now fully work hardened and will have to be annealed.  Then it will be a matter of the final shape and detailing.  I intend to cut the excess off of the edge, but that may have to become a kind of foot if I can’t shape the rim like I want to.

I was walking on an unfamiliar part of West 21st Street when I came across a busy landscape crew working behind an iron fence. I wouldn’t have noticed but the light was beautiful behind the fence, illuminating old, white headstones, an unusual sight this far downtown.  The inscription above the gate let me know what it is.

The lady in charge introduced herself as Christine.  She invited me in and she gave me some history of the cemetery.  It was only used  about 20 years until the city passed an ordinance in 1851 that there should be no burials below 86th street.  This synagogue had been given  permission to re-inter  members that had been buried in an earlier cemetery  further south of this one.  Those graves date back to the American Revolution.  I had never seen headstones like these with beautifully engraved  Hebrew script.

Here are some more photos. Christine, who is a stone conservator, said that she was having a hard time convincing her workers that the stones are fragile and that they should be careful around them.

There are a number of these engraved bluestone markers, this one is pre revolutionary, dated 1729, marked both in Hebrew and English.

I stood in the back of the cemetery to make these shots and combined them into one panorama.  The entrance and 21st street is to the right.  Where I am standing is near the oldest graves.

Yesterday was a beautiful Fall day, perfect for a stroll through Snug Harbor for the Connect the Dots Arts Festival. The Art Lab, COAHSI, Children’s Harbor and the Noble Maritime Collection are the Dots to visit on the Snug Harbor grounds and on the fence surrounding the east side of Snug Harbor, the Staten Island Museum and the Snug Harbor Studio Artists held the annual Art on the Fence Show. This was the first time I have ever participated in it.
Setup, at 9 AM, was early for me on a Sunday morning. Our friend and neighbor Kevin lent me a couple of tables and a fold out awning for the days event. Without that help I wouldn’t have been able participate or survive the direct sunlight. Here it is, freshly set up just before cars were banned from the street.

I had been preparing the display  for about three weeks, it was nice to see it all together at last.

Colman minding the store.

Heres the view in our mirror for try-ons and a panorama of the street later in the day.  We saw a lot of our friends, met new people and sold a few pieces of jewelry.  I’m looking forward to the Friends of Fire Show in November.

It’s been an interesting couple of days, aside from the regular activities I have begun to chase a saucer for the Wine Cup I finished  a while ago.  Last week in class I annealed and began to sink the center of the saucer.  The flat pieces of silver still seem hard to me, it’s not until they have some capacity for volume that I am able to anneal AND feel that he metal has softened enough to work on.  This saucer was no  different, in disk form it still seemed to be quite resistant to movement when I tried to bend it by hand. It had a slight warp in it as I put it into the Pitch bowl. I used the same stencils I made for the cup to draw the design on to the saucer with a sharpie. Then I scratched the drawing in with an awl.

Here it is with the design scratched in, the perimeter and center are chased,and the sharpie lined have been cleaned off so that I can see where the chasing tool should go.

More chasing a little later.

All the leaf shapes were chased  before drawing in the center veins, a cautionary step to insure that I get them properly centered.  My drawing is never geometrically perfect, so I do some things in steps in order to make visual corrections along the way.  I have begun to hammer down the background.  The saucer warp had increased and  the silver separated from the pitch along two sides. I hammered the supported metal and then removed the saucer from the pitch, used a mallet to flatten the lifted edges and replaced the saucer into the pitch bowl.

The saucer reset, one of the lifted sides has been hammered down and I am beginning to finish the ground in this photo.

In this side view you can see that the work is continuing to warp the saucer.

Out of the bowl the saucer looks more like a potato chip.

I used a mallet to flatten it again and reset it into the bowl so that it could be worked on from the back. I work on each type of leaf separately,  that way the whole saucer is worked on, one small area at a time.  The things I learn can be repeated and improved as I work on each similar element. I’m also hoping to control the warp factor  better that way too.

This is where it is for the moment.

After a number of stops today, I wound up at Metalliferous and got Dave to get me a 7 inch silver disk for the next project in class. It came to $210 and change,  a big expense, but that’s what I needed for my sense of well being as much as making a small teapot.

When I showed it to Gennady, he asked the gauge, I told him it was 18 but I thought it was heavier, it looked thicker. He measured it, it was a full millimeter in thickness, more than 18 Gauge.

The teapot is to be a kind of squat melon shape. The sketch I drew was for a pot about 110 mm in diameter and about 60 mm in height. I had also drawn an expanded version that was about 125 mm x  78 mm, I asked if we could try for the larger pot  with the metal we have,  he said  we would need to stretch the metal and he set out a plan for me using a sand bag to make a bowl from the disk before I do any raising.  He gave me a ball ended hammer that you’ll see in the photos and told me to start at the perimeter spiraling my way into the center of the disk.  He said that I should be able to gain about 2 inches in height before we need to use a stake.

Here’s what the disk looked like after I’d been hammering a little while, some of the disk is still flat in the center. Gennady came over to where I was working and struck the disk a few times, he decided that the sand bag was too loose,  ( I had been making constant re-arrangements which were more annoying than difficult, but still manageable) and we went to a stump that had depressions in it.  He told me that I should strike a little lighter because the wood was more aggressive than the sandbag. I liked the bowl’s shape and crinkled edge,  if I was going for a serving dish,  I would have stopped here and begun to give it a final finish.

I hammered the disk into a bowl shape trying to keep the movement uniform, it was still a bit lumpy.  The hammering is done on the inside of the bowl with the round end of the hammer (D4 in the photo) at this stage .

I took  the bowl over to Gennady and he said that I should do it again without annealing. I was very surprised a but excited by what  was happening. In the next photo it’s hammered half way around the lip of the bowl, at this point it was about 40 mm deep  and 160 mm in diameter.

When I finished the second round, it was a little deeper and about 150 mm in diameter.  Now I annealed it .

Looking at the bowl, we were about to mark the base of the teapot, Gennady set it onto the raised edge of his desk, took a small hammer from the closet behind him and struck it once in the center. ” Ah”, he said, “I think you can(should) stretch this more”,  it will give me more to work with when I start to raise the sides. We marked the base line  and he struck the bowl along the line a few times to push the metal down inside the base, showing me where I should make the stretch.  He told me I should be able to push another quarter inch out of it. I was really impressed that he seemed to feel or hear  the potential with a simple strike of the hammer.

Here’s what it looked like after I had completed the round of  sinking the base.  It’s a little lumpy especially seen on the inside.

He told me to even it out, ‘ Be meticulous’.  I was working in a small depression on the stump and made it happen.  The 7″ disk started out at a diameter of  177 mm, at this stage it measured 198 mm.  The metal had been stretched about 7/8″.  All of this took place in less than three hours.

A couple of weeks ago we drove to Danielson for Taybin and Kat’s Wedding.

Friday  evening, the 21st of August,  there was a pre-wedding dinner in Adi and Sabine’s backyard.

The bride and groom on the deck.

Cousins Dominic and Angelika had arrived from Germany.

Colman is talking with Henning, Sabine’s brother.

Kat  and Melanie.

Henning’s wife Courtenay and Titian,  they all came from the West coast for the wedding.

Here’s a movie of Cary’s toast to the couple.

Saturday, August 22, 2009 at the  wedding

Our friends Pam and Marty, we’re staying with them while we’re on Danielson.

Adi and Sabine’s neighbors, Mark and Dorothy.

Adi and Sabine,  father and mother of the groom.

The Vows.

before dinner at our table, Marty and Al.

Taybin.

Adi, Linda and Colman at our table before the buffet was set.

Nancy and Isaac were married a few weeks ago in new York,  Roger stands in the middle.

Angelika was taking photos. I got her into the next shot with Al and Linda (Isaac’s parents),  Titian and Anja.

Al , Isaac and Nancy,  Isaac put me into the next photo.

Ann and Keith.

Eunice, Cary, Greg and Ethan.

Sunday, Kat and Taybin are on the lake for a short honeymoon.  We went for ice cream to WE LIK IT with the rest of the family.