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.

The underlying project is making the spout for my teapot. This past Friday I made a new stake from a stainless steel rod on which I could close the test spout I’m making out of copper. The spout is apparently way too big for my pot and Gennady assures me that we will be able to cut the model down to determine the proper amount of silver needed for the pot. I have already cut off about 50 mm from the narrow end.

This new stake is designed to be put into a vise while I use it. The interesting and difficult thing about making a shape like this is the number of stakes I use in the course of a few minutes.  Closing the seam along the top took considerable work, I got it very close but Gennady  got it even tighter.  The closing is necessary because he wanted me to solder the first inch or so of the spout end. We used a delrin mallet for all of this closing and shaping.

I found this stake very useful in shaping the bell of the spout which helped to close that part of the seam.  Now that the end is soldered, Gennady wants me to planish the spout before we make any cuts to find the true form within this bell.

At home, the main push has been to finish what I am now calling the Lion Cup. I removed it from the pitch and used some of my snarling irons to push the animal bodies into higher, rounder relief.  The work hardened background kept the cup in shape while I worked on the cup inside, pushing the forms out a little more. I am continually amazed by the dramatic change in appearance a slight movement of the metal makes.  Here’s the snarled cup, off of the pitch, after it was annealed. 

I put it back on the pitch stick and began to texture the background with a small nail punch. The background work started by outlining all of the figures with a single line of marks. I found that I had to slightly overlap the little punch marks while making the outline because when I put them side by side, it looked like the figures had perforated edges. Once a background area was surrounded, I filled in with a lot of marks, I added a circle or crescent in some of the larger areas to bring a little  more continuity to the design narrative.

It took several sessions in about 4 days to complete the entire surface of the background.

Here is the cup bottom. While it was off of the pitch, I signed the piece with my mark. I happen to have a pipe that was the perfect thickness and diameter to work as a stake for this decorated bottom. One point and one trefoil have been modeled, that’s the next step for the sides too.

March 5, 2010

Friday I began to make a copper spout in the proper gauge. I flattened the foil spout and made a paper copy adding about 7 mm for the decorative edge where it is to connect to the pot and another 7 mm on the seamat one end where the foil model didn’t join as it should.

Here’s the 18 gauge piece. I began on the sand bag but had to move to the depression in a stump.

The stump is more effective with the delrin mallet.

After getting the basic shape to move I switched to a ball peen type hammer to stretch the metal a little.

Then with various stakes,  the shape began to be refined and closed.  I’m using the delrin hammer on the stakes.

Gennady has me trying to institute some of the breaks in the curve on the underside of the spout.

The spout was annealed and pickled before trying to close it some more.

March 12, 2010

Trying to close it some more and flare the edges that will attach to the pot.

After annealing it was apparent that the spout is way too big for my pot.  We decided to continue. I can cut the flange down and trim the spout length.  My original idea and proportion is in there somewhere. It’s change in size is probably from the flattened, stretched original pattern and the bit I added for the flange and an edge that didn’t close in the foil model. I’ll trim it at the pencil line.

March 12 or there about. . .

At home, I’m chasing the bottom of my cup. A stencil for part of the radiating design of trefoils and points.

All chasing is in.

Setting the background down.

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.

November 6

I had worked on my teapot and it was time to trim the top. Gennady had to do it.  We marked it with the surface gauge and gennady got out a large pair of metal shears. One of the handles was locked in a vise, he held the pot in one hand and worked the other part of the scissor-like shear trimming the pot. The uneven thickness of my raising made trimming the edge difficult. Here’s a shot of the trimmed pot and the bits he cut off of it.

After trimming I annealed the pot and planished it from the middle toward the top. I had marked it again with the surface gauge  at a point about 25 mm from the lip where I wanted to close the top a little more. This is as far as I got before class ended.

We were invited to tonight’s opening by another old friend Robin Sherrin. It’s a group show of etchings by the New York Society of Etchers being held at the Art Club in Grammercy Square.

I got there early  so I was able to find  Robin’s print  in the collection of  what looked like about 60 works.  I also saw Steven Fredericks  who runs the society and for whom I have made portfolios in the past.  It was amazing how many people showed up. Here’s a shot of one of the three rooms in which the prints were hung.

Here’s Robin with Colman.

The Art Club is a fascinating place. It’s Old New York like we see in the movies.  Marble, stained glass, heavy woodwork and tiles all in a genteel setting complete with door man and concierge. As we were leaving I took this photo of us in a mirror in the entrance hall, you get an idea of the atmosphere from the things you see around us.

We walked out of Grammercy park toward Fifth Avenue where we were to catch the R train to South Ferry and passed by this doorway. I stopped to look at the decorative work and the unusual iron work railing.

When we got to Fifth Avenue we were near the Met Life Tower fully lit for the evening.

October 15

In class I began to close the top part of the teapot.  We  scratched a line about 50 mm from the base and I  planished a line to harden the pot at that height.  Then I began to raise and close the upper half of the pot. This is as far as I got in class.

At home I worked on the pot and finished the round.  I don’t have a big enough torch to anneal  something this large at home so I have to wait until next class to continue.

At this point it holds 16 ounces of water and I am thinking that I should  redesign the final shape.  I have been looking at a number  of teapots and think a squat pear shape will give me more volume and surface area to chase on.

Here’s a picture of the saucer,  Gennady wants me to work on the rim which means annealing it again. He thought the rim was ‘boring’.  I have come to agree that it does need something to finish it properly.

October 22

Back at FIT, I was to work on the bottom half with a Hook Hammer. I raised and closed the top some more.

Then Gennady set me by a stump with a depression and showed me how to use the hook hammer striking the pot on the inside below the raised and hardened area.  He produced a continuous and regular line of raised surface on the outside of the pot. When I did it, the line looked more like a segmented caterpillar.

You can see some of the first strikes inside the pot here.

Here it is at the end of class, the shape is pushed out at the base, it’s a little lumpy but we can smooth it out in the next rounds.

The sun was setting during the ferry ride home. Here’s the Statue of Liberty  with the Elizabeth port container cranes and the Bayonne Bridge.

October 29

Last week’s class was a lot of work. Work I wasn’t really skilled enough to do.  Gennady wanted me to set the base so that i could planish the lower half of the pot. I set up my flat top stake and tried to sharpen the circle of the pot’s base. It was very hard to find and strike, the base is so wide and was slightly warped, the sides of the pot had been pushed out for the nice round shape of a teapot and were interfering with the face of the hammer.  Luckily, Gennady  came to my aid before I had done too much damage and started to correct out my poorly struck edges. When he saw a particularly bad strike,  he said,  ”That ‘s your last mistake.”  I was in danger of thinning the metal out too much in a very small area. While he worked his way around the pot  he showed me that I could push some of the rounded side wall down in order to get the base circle set.  Something I had been avoiding and in the process of that avoidance, I lost sight and control of the circle I was trying to secure.  Then he chose another stake, in the foreground of the next photo,  with a small stake insert that fit the shape of my pot.  He showed me how I should strike with the planishing hammer  and I began. I spent most of the class time planishing up to the half way mark, slowly  striking, watching reflections connect and build a uniform surface. The planishing, though slow, was something I could do.  Setting the base on a vessel with this shape will take a LOT of practice.

Once I made it up to the mark I switched stakes and began to close the to some more.  This is as far as I got with that

This photo show how Gennady ‘tacked’ the base  with a network of hardened spots rather than hardening and possibly thinning the entire bottom. I intend to sink the center so that there will be a foot to the pot and a depressed area for chasing and hall marks.

November 1

I finished raising the pot today. I also gave the top half a bit of light planishing to even out the surface and marry the curves of the profile.

It  now holds over 22 ounces of water  with about 12mm of air space. We will eventually trim the top edge and solder a bezel in place into which the lid will fit.

Now that the shape is nearing what I want, it’s time to start planning the spout and handle. Usually this would be designed before the disk received the first hammer blow, but this pot has become larger than my original drawing and I would like to take advantage of the extra volume that has been created.  This project has become one that is being designed as we move along. I’m leaning toward one more like the one in the top of the right hand sketch.

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.

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.