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I started this new copper vessel about three weeks ago in class at FIT. I started with a 12 inch square of 20 gauge copper from which I cut a 12 inch diameter circle. Having made a vessel with 18 gauge, I knew I needed to have something slightly thinner raising a larger vessel. I started in my usual way which is to sink a shallow bowl before beginning to raise the shape. These large vessels are really difficult to control. I got a pretty good height on the first half of the first round. Then I had to change angles because I couldn’t continue hammering on metal that was gathering too quickly.

On the second round I planished a band of the first round before the break  and then raised it the rest of the way.

Starting the Third round,  I had decided that the bottom part was about where I wanted it, I planished another time just below half way before I began to raise the pot. Gennady stopped me working on the t-stake and suggested I use a mushroom stake instead for the large diameter, saying I would be more comfortable. We searched the stake closet and I found this one, it was more comfortable and I was able to use it on the following rounds.

Almost there One more round to go.

Last round.

In my studio today, I began to work the shapes into the vessel this afternoon.  I began by dividing the surface.

Some of my divisions were off and I had to draw an equator where I could measure with dividers to make the corrections. I attached a sharpie to my surface gauge.

The drawing behind the vessel is one Colman is working on. He calls it Night Scribe, it is the idea behind this vessel. I intend to chase feathers onto raised ribs in this copper pot.

With the  lines corrected, I made a stencil of a feather silhouette to trace around the pot.

Then I took a dapping punch and hammered the beginning dimples at the bottom of the pot. I did this because I was going to hammer the feathers out from the inside and I needed some reference inside to help me strike in the right places.

Lines were drawn inside the vessel so I could manage the sculpture in stages rising from the bottom.

The sand bag was set on my bench and I used the hook hammer to start pushing the feather shapes out.

After working the feathers up about two thirds of the height I wanted to push the grooves between them deeper from the outside. It became apparent that I couldn’t go too high with this activity, some wrinkles started in two places and I knew that I had to complete the feathers before going any further. I used the ball peen end of the chasing hammer to do this work on the outside.

I finished pushing the feathers out to their tops (this isn’t the end of that). At this point I decided to trim the pot. The uneven edge was going to be a problem to cut if I continued to scallop the top edge. So I marked the rim, trimmed it and brought a preliminary groove up to the rim.

While the pot was resting (I wasn’t willing to put it down), I looked to see if I could make the drawing survive the next annealing.  I thought it would be a good idea to scratch the sharpie lines in with a scribe. While I was doing that, it occurred to me that I could do some chasing at the base to start the feather’s pin end. I chased and I saw that I needed to push that part out more, nothing like drawing all over the surface to bring details into focus. I got out a snarling iron and was able to raise the pinions and raise the ends of the feathers that the hook hammer hadn’t been able to reach. It has to be annealed before I can do much more.

Now that it’s Christmas and gifts have been opened, I can show a piece I’ve been working on for the past few weeks without spoiling a surprise. I haven’t worked the whole time on this piece because there were emergency projects in the studio for client’s Christmases to finish first.

Adi has been interested in greek armor and cuirasses and helments have figured in his watercolors and paintings. I wanted to make one for him and picked up a sheet of a brass alloy at metalliferous about three weeks ago.
In discussing the project with Gennady, he advised me to start by doming the sheet first to get some height and volume into the basic shape. I sketched out a outline and domed the piece like this keeping the edges of the sheet close to it original plane. The metal stretched to form a shape over an inch high. Here it is about to be annealed, looking into the concave side,

In the studio at home I began to model the piece, I didn’t want to use pitch so I filled the dome with plasticine an adhered the piece to a piece of binder’s board. My chasing tools are too small to make the soft shapes that I needed to express musculature so I found some wooden dowels and a flat piece of wood to use as chasing tools. They were effective in achieving the shapes I wanted. When I needed to do some pushing from the inside, I was able to remove the piece from the plasticine, tap it out and then replace it to continue modeling the surface. Here’s photo that shows the tools (except for the chasing hammer), the piece attached to the binder’s board and the photo I was using as a guide for proportion followed by another photo close up of the piece. I sketched in the navel and nipples with a sharpie and had begun to chase in the navel when these photos were taken.

Taking the piece off of the plasticine, I used my chasing tool to outline the cuirass in preparation for trimming the sheet metal.

While in class, about ten days ago, I was closing the spout for my silver teapot. That in itself has been another learning experience, figuring out which stake and which hammer let alone the angle at which to strike to get the metal to move has been very hard for me.  I am including this photo because it shows the  cuirass at a different angle. 

Back in the studio this week, I used a rounded dash, sausage shaped chasing tool to outline the cuirass and then used shears to cut it free of the excess sheet metal.  Then I stood the same chasing tool in a vise and used the hammer to close the rounded edge. The flex shaft tool was used to give the edge a uniform depth.  

The edge was still not closing enough so I made another narrower chasing tool to help me do that. This is a narrower version of the ‘sausage shape’ tool I used to mark and start turning the edge.

I held the cuirasse in a position like this and struck with a planishing hammer to bring the edge around.

Once that was done I made brass rings  to represent  the rings on a  full scale cuirasse’s shoulders where leather  straps would have held the armor together when it was worn.  The rings were soldered in place, the piece was pickled and polished with 600 grit  emory paper in preparation for a patina.

I applied a blackening solution with the heat of my torch and then rubbed it down with a cloth which removed some of the black surface.  It looked too ‘dry’ so I applied a little wax to unify the surface.  Here it is finished  before it went into a presentation box.

About 2 weeks ago I stumbled across this video on YouTube. Hiroshi is working in Fine silver in a Japanese technique called shibori.

I had been looking for information about Japanese metal raising after I saw and collected an article on Wayne Meeten’s work. His spectacular ‘Spiral Dance’ graced the cover of Craft Arts International magazine,  #77. (I came across this while we were in a Santa Fe gallery.) In the article, it spoke of his traveling to Japan to study and showed intriguing photos of him at work on large vessels that he held in his lap. There was no pitch inside. I read the description ‘air chasing’ somewhere else and have just decided that this is probably what was being described. 

Yesterday I finished annealing a number of small pieces and wanted to try some of this technique knowing nothing about it. I had a round bowl about 4 inches tall that was ready for the experiment. I also had 3 snarling irons that I made in the last class for work on my cups. They are shorter than the traditional snarling irons and I have made special ‘heads’ on them to reach into the base of cups and to make very small raised areas.  I set one into my bench after drawing some lines and circles on the bowl.

This is the bowl balancing on the small head iron.

This is the working end of my  ’small head’ snarling iron. After using it for awhile I discovered that I could strike the iron more firmly and the small head could be giuded more like a chasing tool, not making the series of wart like bumps that I made in the beginning. 

It was exciting to see that I had control over where the repoussè was going, I could easily keep to my lines, raising an interesting texture.

I had set up two vises with the irons, one for the lines and a broader headed iron for the circular bumps. 

This is just to show you the atmosphere in which I am working,  The second vise is just out of the photo on the right. I found myself moving between the two, hammer in hand, finishing each area as I worked around the bowl. 

I had figured out that the lines should go in first so that those areas would be work hardened, they should act like a skeleton in the body of the bowl. That way I could  make a dramatic difference when I took larger tools to the wide areas. I worked those areas after I tried to harden and deepen the  areas where lines came together or crossed. 

At first I used this chasing tool to make the whole area go down. It quickly became obvious that all I needed was the ball peen side of my chasing hammer and I could reserve tool using for the areas where design relief was closer together or needed definition.

I began to define the round shapes with a few of my chasing tools, it’s shiny where I have started to round out the bumps. Even as I was working on rounding the edges, I could go back to the broad snarling iron and push from the inside where I needed it.

Instinctively I was working from the center  of the bowl’s sides around the bowl. Then I began to work on the lip and foot sides of the ridges

This is where it is now, there has been no annealing, the edge has to be resolved and I think a few hours in the tumbler will give it a nice finish, it might even get a silver plating.

It’s taking me a long time to tell about the trip to Canada. In the meantime, since that trip there was also a week in Santa Fe with our friends David and Mary Jane, there’s a backlog of photos and I want to talk about current activities.

I have registered for school at FIT, finished the Lion Cups (and am beginning to market them) and am working on two small candy bowls. The whole perspective of metal work has changed from making one piece that I want as a single object into making the model of the piece that I want for reproduction. I even look at jewelry pieces as modular, to use the castings in necklaces and bracelets, as pendants and brooches. The drawings I have made in my sketch books over the past three years are coming to life as pieces of a collection of similar pieces, adaptable to different stones and mechanical connections.

First, photos of the Lion Cups; I made special boxes for them treating them like the treasures they are. The copies are in pure silver with 24 karat gold inside. They weigh just under 5 ounces each.

Here they are in the boxes,  paste paper covered and lined with green velvet.

I have also finished another small bowl based on Colman’s Drawing.  It’s got a smaller diameter so that the sides are taller which lets the ‘Shields’  be seem more easily.  The first bowl was wider with an impressive inside, the out side was more difficult to see below eye level.  The new bowl has a deeper scalloped edge.  The first bowl is in the works to be produced as a silver plated copper bowl, when that one is done satisfactorily we will have a mold made for this one too.

Over the weekend I started to raise two 5″ disks of copper. I have the urge to make a sugar bowl and creamer.  As it turned out the disks were too small for the shape and size I had in mind and I decided to turn the small disks into candy/nut dishes.  Here are some progress shots to the point where I am about to start the chasing phase of the work.

I sank the disks into a depression to start and this shot was taken after the second raising.  At this point I began to push the bowl on the right out with the hook hammer on a sand bag.  The bowl on the left had been intended to be a kind of pedestal saucer before I decided that it too was too small for the intended purpose, so I shifted course and raised it as a bowl.  Each of the disks have different diameter bases, it’s just a little behind the bowl that was on a surer path to its final shape.

I’m about half way up from the base of the small diameter bowl in this shot.

The large bowl was raised again and the pair is almost the same height. The larger bowl holds 8 ounces of liquid.

The large bowl was rounded out and I began to draw the chasing design, it is to be a companion to my first wine cup, I’m using the same stencils and layout.

The bottom design has yet to be drawn onto the bowl.

I intend to design the small bowl as a companion to the Lion Cup, that will involve considerable redrawing as the stencils are too tall for this bowl.

The bowl got an over all light planishing to even out the surface. I still had some deep hammer marks in a few places but wanted to soften them later.  I was more interested in adding something of interest to the base for  visuals inside the bowl.

I drew a star on the base of the bowl, no chasing, I just started to push the metal down with repoussé tools. In the past I have chased a design on the outside of a vessel meant to be see on the inside and didn’t like the way it worked. Recently I saw a guy on YouTube just go in to the back of a large platter (on black pitch) very deeply with repoussé tools, when the front was exposed, he went in to define the figures with what looked like chasing tools, considerably softer-edged than mine.  The Corwin book talks about ‘running’ tools of different widths and profiles for different effects. That must be what he was doing.  I’m moving just a little way down that road with this element.

While I worked on the sides, the pitch lining was cracking a little.  That was  most likely due to its thinness, if I had filled the bowl or lined it more heavily, it may not have cracked in the same way. As it was, I just heated the inside of the lining, pressed the pitch back together, let it cool and continued to work.

When I put the star in the base, it knocked out a piece of the pitch, metal was pushed farther than the thin layer of pitch would allow.

The pitch was melted out of the bowl and I soaked it in turpentine for about 4 hours (to remove pitch residue without fire), while I had dinner and watched Thursday night TV.

Afterwards I gave the bowl a brass brushing  to remove the turps and cut one of the scallops to see if my shears were the right tool, they worked.

The star had a lumpy appearance inside the bowl. Again, something new from the Corwin book, I took some plasticine that had been lying around the studio for years and put it to work. The base had to be supported while I worked on it but I didn’t want to go through the pitch placing and removal process for this small part of the bowl. We were having a heat wave when I picked up the plasticine, it was more pliable than it had been during winter, still pretty stiff but nothing like it was when I was using it years ago in cooler weather.

I packed an inch thick layer of plasticine onto the base and  worked on a board for mobility and to keep the oily stuff of of my worktable. I worked on defining the edges of the star with a pear shaped repoussé tool.

After I worked on the inside a bit, I made a bigger piece for the inside so I could work on it  from the outside.  The plasticine had to be tall enough to raise the rim of the bowl  above  the board.

Working from the outside I was able to smooth out the star’s surface. It was interesting to note that when I remover the plasticine from the inside the copper and the clay were both blackened. I don’t know if there was some unknown agent acting  because it didn’t happen on the outside of the vessel with plasticine from a different part of my stash.

The whole base outside of the star was still not work hardened,  I began to us a dowel to push the base around the star flatter, the bowl is unsupported, resting on the board.

I spent a lot of time refining the shape of the bowl, widening and making the base circular, and removing the visual break between the base and the curved sides.  It took a combination of different hammers and mallets, short trips to a stake, stump depression and board, and  the use of different shaped wooden dowels.

I cut out all of the scallop dips.

The rim was filed into shape ( #2, #4 half round files) and sanded with 800 grit emery paper.  I gave the whole surface a rubdown with the 8oo grit paper. I think it’s finished now, removing the texture might remove its character.

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  in my upstairs studio, the light is better there and I can set the stake at a higher position so that Ican see the reflections of my hammer strikes clearly as they are made.  I scratched a 50 mm circle on the base and  set the base by flattening the bottom and striking the sides as I worked my way around the base.  The first cup has been  nearly set in this photo, the next shot shows the flattened base before I struck the sides. 

This is the stake, I only use one small portion of the edge, striking only on that spot to keep the base round.

This is the second piece before any striking has been done.

This is the desk with all my projects, the vise and cups are on the far side under the lamp.

The cups went back downstairs where I began to raise them on the pipe in my vise.

This is the round completed  with the newly set bases before I annealed them.

Next,  I 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.

Two Thursdays ago I raised the teapot  some more in class.  Gennady and I also discussed the handle and how it was to be attached.  I will need 8 mm wide bezels into which  a wooden plug will be set after the handle has been joined to it.  Maybe ebony and now I need to finalize my ideas about the handle as well as a spout.

This is as far as I got  before class ended.

Over the weekend I finished raising the pot.  Gennady’s sketches of the handle connection are in blue on my concept sketch, my desired profile drawing with measurements is on the right side of the photo.

I was concerned that the pot was closing up more than it should toward the bottom, I made a  tombo 120 mm long with a foot to bring it to the right height for the 120 diameter.  A tombo is a Japanese tool that potters use to throw pots of a consistent size. They are usually made of bamboo and are suspended from a stick looking much like a dragonfly, tombo. They may have two cross bars, one for height and one for diameter, the tail dipping into the vessel for the depth measurement. When I put it inside the teapot I could see just where the diameter was 120 mm,  the foot should touch the bottom of the pot but it is about 8 mm above, floating in the air.  Gennady assures me that we will be able to widen the pot after we get as much height as we can out of the metal.

I set the base and began to raise the pot again from a place just above where the tombo was resting. Raising now is toward the vertical as I try to close the top diameter some more.

When I got to class last Thursday,  I did a little planishing on the base and then we stopped to see a film on raising a freeform bottle. In the film there was a lot of  model making, measuring and template use, but the thing that stuck with me was that  the silversmith would often start raising from the top down and then go back to  work on the middle section between hardened areas.  That seemed to be close to what I needed to do with my teapot.  I stopped planishing my way to the top, drew a pencil line where I needed to start raising and after a little mallet work I began to raise above the line leaving the center section shape unchanged.

It didn’t close up very much and I only gained about 2 mm in height.

Gennady said that my hammer strikes were not close together enough, he pointed to dull areas between the shiny strike marks and  and indicated that the silver there was not contributing to raising the sides. I was to strike slowly and watch the reflections so that they touched each other raising all of the metal together.  It was annealed and pickled before I began raising again, I took a mallet to the lower part of the pot and hammered with force on the bull nose end of the stake to harden the metal and to remove the lumpy parts rounding out the shape a little more. Here’s a look at the second round for this raising, he said the hammering was better and I can see that the top is closing a little more. This is as far as I was able to get before the class ended.

The Saucer

I spent some time last weekend working on the saucer too. A medium sized nail punch was used to put in the textured background around the leafy center.  The outlines were done first in an attempt to control the warping.

As I worked my way around, I was sharpening the leaf detail and smoothing out the leaf surfaces. To keep track of where I was with the leaves, I stamped in the background and  lowered the outer ring of the chased circle once I had finished a set of leaves.

All finished. I heated the saucer off of the pitch and soaked it in turpentine to remove the pitch that was stuck in the relief on the back side.  Then I used a mallet on the back side to remove most of the warp.

In class last Thursday, Gennady said I shouldn’t remove the excess and  urged me to do something with the outer rim. I decided that I wanted  to arc the rim downward and he told me how I should go about it. I was to take a piece of wood and put two nails in it to control the rotation of the saucer.  He said to make a shallow groove  above which I would  strike the back of the saucer rim with a dapping tool. That Saturday I took one of my oak tree slices and set it up like this with two large brass brads as my nail/guides.

It worked very well, I struck the rim in the groove which had been carved to fit my saucer rim rotating the saucer once the silver was bent. Halfway around, I had to raise the brads a little because the rim was curved upwards and took up more space under their heads. I went around a second time aiming the dapping tool toward the center and outer edge to smooth out the curve.

Then I was looking for a stake so that I could do a little planishing on the top surface.  I settled on the ball side of my ball peen hammer, it had been filed down so that it wasn’t round like a ball but has a flattened, slightly domed, slightly rectangular face that seemed to be a good match for the inside of my curved rim. The hammer is in the vise in the lower right of the next photo.

Planishing made the chased and lowered edge of the border look too sharp. I have had to put the saucer back on the pitch so I can work around the border to make the irregular depression tool marks less evident.

Here’s a look at my bench where there are a number of projects taking place.  The center is set up to make photos of a cuff I just finished.

And here’s the cuff. It is sterling set with khaki turquoise, jade and carnelian cabochons.  I made it for me, I need something new to wear.

Today I began to raise a silver wine goblet. Classes were not held last week because of the Jewish Holidays so I wasn’t able to start it until today. Here’s a photo of the disk that I purchased about 2 weeks ago. It’s 6 inches in diameter, that’s 153mm. I say that because from here on in I will always refer to the size in metric terms.

I was a little uneasy about annealing the silver because, being an alloy, it is more temperamental than the copper I have been working with which can take all sorts of over heating and not be compromised like sterling can. Gennady watched me anneal and got me started with the base. Raising is a longer process and the very first steps are passed through quickly, and only once, after that it is a lot of hammer swinging to gradually close and shape the vessel. Starting from a flat disk is difficult because there is no shape to hammer against, only a circle scratched around the center mark. The hammer has tio strike on one side of the line against the edge of a stake to make a dent in the metal, you strike again and again lengthening the dent along the outside of the circular scratch until you come full circle and the dent forms a base of the goblet to be. The disk now looks something like a sombrero with a very low crown. The next step is to crimp the sombrero’s brim. A special stake that is shaped something like a boat with the bow cut off is set into the stake holder and a special mallet with a tapered hear is used to hammer the flat parts of the disk into the stake’s groove like a loose accordion fold, this raises the disk edges and begins to decrease its diameter. This photo was taken after I had begun to raise the pleated disk into a bowl shape. You can see a little of the crimping remains above the raised portion, vessels are always hammered from the base to the lip. The out side first and then the inside.

Here it is after the first round of raising. The diameter went from 153mm to 148mm. The height of the bowl went from nothing to about 30mm. The base is 50mm.

The bowl was annealed and pickled and I began a second round. Class ended before I could complete it, I may be able to do that this tomorrow if my pipe in the basement vise matches the stake I’m using at school.

Here’s a photo of the stakes.The blue one on the right is for raising and shaping, the other one is the crimping stake which has two grooved tops.

On the ferry ride home we were treated to the sight of the Queen Mary 2 in the Hudson River side of the harbor. We all wondered why it was out of place, it’s usually berthed in the East River Brooklyn Terminal on the other side of Governor’s Island. A guy said that this was the farewell voyage, and the ship was being shown off and being given a send off celebration. Apparently it has been purchased by Dubai and it will become a hotel. I guess never to sail the seas again. As we pulled away from the scene there was a fire boat with all its hoses running like a great water flower in the harbor near the Queen Mary 2 while helicopters flew in attendance over head and smaller escort boats motored around its hull. Here are a few shots, one from the slip as we were leaving and another with the Goldman Sachs Building on the Jersey side of the harbor in the background.