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The Yad was finished about 2 weeks ago. It had taken almost 2 weeks to design and execute the chain. I wanted something different and made a variation on a standard loop in loop chain. I made large jump rings, stretched and twisted them into a shape that added texture and interest to the chain itself. Where the chain divided to make a loop was a problem that I solved by adding a medallion. I had a difficult time making the Mogen David and on the third attempt I was successful. The short chain between the Yad and the medallion is seven links, one for each day of creation. The links forming the loop number 28 which is the lunar month. An inscription plate separates the month into two fortnights.  The Yad is in the  Jewish Museum Design Shop on 92nd Street now.

Making the medallion gave me 3 models, 2 of which have been prepared for casting. The first casting is in the chain on the Yad.  I intend to use the other cast medallions as pendants. In making the center  medallion I discovered I could fuse hammered wires together without solder. The one on the right is a cut, pierced and chased star set into a forged ring.

The original dreidels (in my last entry) have been sold and the museum ordered more. I made  these copper ones and have started to pierce the  letters  in some of them.

I am in the process of making more in silver. It took a while to select the stones and for the past few days I have been piercing and trimming the spinner plates. These are still in a rough state. There will be some chasing work before I add the spindles.

I have also made two bracelets based on the Yad chain.  One in 18 gauge  and one that I wanted to be a tighter link in 16 gauge.

Both of these are in my ETSY shop. They are 8 inches, 209 mm, long and can be ordered in shorter or longer lengths.

In late January I began to paint again. There are a few canvases  in the studio that have gone through many changes in my mind, it was time to put pigment to the thought. This one finished itself before I was ready.  There’s another large canvas in the studio that seems to be finished too, but I don’t feel done with it. It will probably sit around another year before I show it. This one is fine as it is.

I’m not sure this is finished yet. I’ve been sketching this in color on my iPad which has given me the luxury of trying a number of compositions before I got to the easel. But the paint doesn’t always do what you want it to do.

Colman and I went out to Gennady’s studio during the school break to visit and get my spout welded. Here’s Gennady just after the job was done.

The welded spout, cooling down.

Now it’s cleaned up, ready to be annealed and filled with pitch.

At home I was working on a number of projects. We were waiting for cups and saucers to be electro formed in Rhode Island and I was working on another cup and some jewelry. These are pieces of a chain, I was working on two at the time. Both of them were finished today. The recent rise in silver prices has made finishing these chains a proposition to consider, the selling price is going to be much higher than it was last year.  Each of the chains weigh in at 4 ounces.

My whole work bench with several projects on it.  The large vase in the center is  an attempt to completely shape and chase without pitch.  It has progressed since then but will probably need another 15 hours or so.

The finished chains. Ovals and Bubbles. . .

We had a nice day about 10 days ago and Colman took this shot of me with a new begonia that has bloomed. 

This is a small silver leafed begonia  (in a 2 inch  pot ) that Tibor gave me,  it has taken off and is blooming too.  He says that his plant is bigger and fuller but hasn’t bloomed, it’s probably the extra light in our greenhouse that is giving our plants a longer stretch of daylight.

Last week I finished a lot of Portfolios for Talas.

In the back yard crocus are blooming. Spring is not far away.

This  year has been exceptional for the number of blooming plants in my collection.  The dracena cuttings have bloomed. This plant has three flowers at once. Two are open in the photo and a third  with its ‘back’ toward us. 

Colman’s Vanda orchid “coerulea “, a species orchid, has opened.  It’s a very good ‘blue’.

At the last shows I was asked to make longer necklaces, necklaces that would go over sweaters and around turtle neck tops. I made these new  sterling findings to carry multiple strands of beads, the frog type hooks can carry 6 to nine strings. this shot was taken before thry were tumble polished.

These are some  of the first pieces. Multi strands of iridescent glass on  my hand made sterling hooks.

These are some shorter necklaces in glass. one comes with matching earrings. 

I was commissioned to make a ring and setting for a special beach stone  about two weeks ago.  It was challenging to set a stone in its natural shape making a kind of basket with a high bezel.  This is a new pendant to go along with earrings of the same design. 

It was a beautiful, if a bit warm, day yesterday. It was the occasion of the first Raritan Bay Arts Festival held on the grounds of the Conference House on Staten Island. There were displays of crafts, some food, demonstrations of Kayak making and, in the afternoon, live music performances.

Steve Nutt, of Friends of Fire, organized the artisan part of the festival; he’s the founder of Friends of Fire which has been an association of artisans, mostly potters, for over 10 years. I recently joined the group and we (a few members of the group) have opened a brick and mortar store in the Stapleton section of Staten Island. You can see the store on it’s faceBook page.

Here are some photos of the event. When I took the photos I was focusing mostly on the participants who are members of the store rather than the entire event. I was there mainly to show my work and couldn’t leave my table for very long.  This is a wide shot of the Crafts area, my ‘tent’ is in the right side of the photo in the back. Steve  is the guy in shorts, his head is framed by the second tent from the right.

Toni, who started, who Casterbridge Fair store in Stapleton, is sitting with her hand made pillows. Janice, another store member, is in black sunglasses with her hand dyed silk scarves near Toni.

This is Judith,  she makes charming ceramic teapots and tableware.  You can see them on the  Friends of Fire at Casterbridge Fair  faceBook page .

Me with my display. I’ll put shots of the whole display up at the bottom of this entry.

Here’s Steve with his new line of majolica on display.

Our friend Christy, another potter, with her New York  ’Delft’.

This guy makes Kayaks. I like the model with pontoons and  a mast. It looks like it should come from Hawaii.

These painted kayaks were on display. I like the one with the three eyes. I think of it as insurance that  you won’t lose your way if the boat is carefully watching your drift.

Here are the shots of my work, from one end of the table to the other.

Colman spent most of the time water coloring.

New earrings in dichroic glass on the left side of the board with a collection of Pearl and Stone  sets. Earrings from an earlier ‘Glass Period’ on the right.

I’ll open this entry with a shot of my display for Art by the Ferry  which took place the first two weekends of  June. The photo was taken by  our friend Sarah Yuster. It turned out to be a successful show. It was on the tail of that energy that I made the following new pieces for the upcoming show this weekend at the Conference House on the southern tip of Staten Island.  It is to be the first Raritan Bay Arts Festival.  Wish us luck and temperate weather.

I have just finished this long silver chain with faceted, polished aquamarine nuggets and hammered silver rings. I loved these stones the minute I saw them, I have others that will be wired together in the byzantine style as the summer progresses. 

Here’s a close up. The hammered silver rings flash and sparkle when the chain moves.

I finished this chain of triplets at the beginning of the week: a choker made of  polished aquamarine stones in a freeform cube shape with large round freshwater pearls, there are matching earrings.  The hook works in all of the large rings and the piece could probably be worn doubled as a bracelet.

This is a collection of earrings and a few pendants in stone and glass that I put together for summer and evening wear.

I also worked on the Lion Cup this week, It will take a little longer  than I expected getting it finished and ready for wine. There’s a lot of polishing to be done on the inside and on the lip. Here’s a photo of the cup as it came from the electro form mold.  We have ordered another one.

The Art By The Ferry Show will be coming up the first two weekends in June. I have been making a number of new pieces of jewelry for the event. Now that the Friends of Fire Store is open I have pieces there as well as the Red Carpet Gallery on Castleton, both of the establishments are on Staten Island.

The first pieces are Part of the fluorite collection I have been making for summer wear.  The fluorite beads are always cool to the touch and come in colors ranging from clear to greens and purples. A few of the beads will have several colors in them in bands or stripes.

This is an eggplant or deep amethyst colored  necklace. I chose the beads to make an elegant monochromatic statement. All the wires and findings are sterling silver, I make the hooks myself.

The next piece is more typically colored Fluorite showing a good range of the colors.

In person, these are all shades of green, the camera and lighting don’t do them justice. I added flashing hammered silver rings to make the piece sparkle as well as glow.

This last piece is made with Dragon Skin Agate. I like the reticulated character of the markings in the stone. The earth tones will compliment  almost every colored outfit, I like to make things that can be worn daily in stead of being saved for a night out or special occasion.  This is being old as a set too.

The first pair of beakers I made  are  for me chase designs that are influenced by cylinder seals. I cut stencils from sheets of mylar for two motifs from a seal’s impression, one of a lion with a goat and one of a large boar with a leaf form. The stencils allow me to place, repeat and reverse directions of the designs around the cup.

Designs were drawn onto the beaker with a sharpie and then scratched  in with an awl. I cleaned the sharpie ink off and set the supporting dowel into a vise so I could begin chasing the designs into the copper. In the next photo, I have already chased lines on the lip and foot of the cup, the scratches are where I will begin to chase the animals onto the cup.

The chasing has started.

I remade my small chasing tool. When it was made last year, it was for chasing curves, I never used it because the regular chasing tool made the gentle curves that I needed very well. The curve tool, however, seemed to just dig in to the metal and was difficult to use. This design requires tighter curves than I can make with the main chasing tool. I looked at the curve tool again and decided that it dug in because the arc of its bite was too round. It was annealed and I let it cool slowly between slabs of fire brick, then I filed the high part of the arc off of the tool to make it closely match the gentle arc of  my main tool. The arc is flatter now like the big tool, the curves are a close match, but this one is on a shorter length of bite.  Now the tool works like it should, gliding along without digging into the metal. I’m only chasing outlines at this stage, but I have scratched in some of the future detailling.

Here’s a close-up of some of the chasing.

Between sessions of chasing I was also raising on two new beakers, one slightly larger and one smaller than the pair I finished last week. Placing the design on the first beaker showed me that I would need some different diameters and heights. I bought a 5″ (126 mm) and a 6″ (172 mm) disk, raising one with a 45 MM diameter and the other with a 50 mm diameter,  aiming for  heights over 75 mm.  Here’s what my cache of pots looked like when I got to class last Friday. There’s also a pin in the lower left that I had begun to make for Colman (his birthday was the 21st).  While in class I made another snarling iron with a small tip. I know I will need one for the new designs.

I finished the pin Saturday and made a box out of paste paper and maroon velvet to present his gift.

Here I have begun to push one side of the chased line down, the branch and one side of the lion is done.

I won’t do the detail lines at all right now,  not having done final working drawings I want to think about it some more and look at photos of the impressions that cylinder seals make before committing to tool marks.  here’s a close-up.

I have to put the cup on the back side of the vise to get to some of the lines properly, the tool can only be seen from one side while I am working with it.

Now I am beginning to put the background down with broader polished tools.  The areas are large and I may have to make a pattern to get it all to go down to the same level around the cup.

Another close up, there’s still a lot of work to be done so I am not worried about the small flaws and irregularities.

I used the sharpie to mark in some of the details on the boar’s hind quarter.  Then I scratched in one line, chased it  and then scratched in the next line.  It felt like I had better control if I made one scratched and chased line at a time. Doing it that way allowed me to use the already chased line as a guide in chasing another line near it.  After  chasing I removed the ink for better visibility.

AfterI finish putting the background down I will remove the cup from the pitch and use a snarling iron to push the animals out a little, then it will be time to anneal and put the cup on the pitch ended dowel again for finishing.

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.

Tonight the annual student show opened at the Fashion Institute of Technology on Seventh Avenue at 28th street. There’s great work from all departments on display in many of the open, street level spaces of the main buildings. In the museum building, in the lobby, women’s fashion are being shown along with packaging design.

Downstairs in the special exhibition halls,  Surface Design, Children’s Toys,  Illustration, Menswear, and  Jewelry with Jewelry Design are on display.

Here are a few shots of the Galleries. There were a lot of people in attendance.

The toys:

The center illustration is a wonderfully atmospheric and frightening picture of a  man who has hooked a monstrously large sea creature.  It’s my favorite of all the illustrations.  I’ll visit it again.

A wall of really nice jewelry designs, many masterfully painted in gouache,  next to cases that contain work from the jewelry and silversmith studios.

Some shots of the individual jewelry cases.

One of my cups and a bracelet are in this case.

Here are some close ups of my pieces in the show.   My rice and sesame cast silver bracelet is on the right.

two of my brooches

The Keum Bu Cat earrings.

My design for a fork.

The recently finished mirror.

The turquois necklace with filigree backed stones.

My Snake Pit tray  is next to Annie Wu’s brilliantly colored necklace.

My copper cat cup has been silver plated.  I think it looks pretty nice but it needs a better polishing. I think I can do that now without removing the plating.

I’ll visit again, there are a lot of interesting things in the show by other students,  I’d like to put them up in another entry when I can give them credit along with the photograph.  The show is up for another 2 weeks, you should visit if you can.  There’s a lot of good work from all the departments of F I T .

Have just finished three new pieces of jewelry. The first is a khaki colored turquoise bracelet with pearls. I made it a couple of weeks ago but wasn’t happy with the clasp which was one of my twisted toggle variations. It took part Saturday to make the new clasp and loop which also shortens the bracelet to 7 5/8″ long, it was almost 8″. I showed it to Molly at Metalliferous, she said it was “Earth Princess Meets L A “, a title I will keep.

The next piece is a pendant, I made it to test a new type of joining, a tube and a ring type of link between the two pieces. I will show it with a wire instead of a chain.

The last piece was put together with a stock sterling cuff that I bought at Metalliferous a long time ago and hadn’t decided what to do with it. These stones came together  when I started to put colors together for contrast instead of trying to find matches, I like the colorful effect and think I may keep this one for myself ( it is a little dainty, so maybe not). It’s about a half inch wide at the widest part by the blue stone.