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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.

I am working on a new silver wine cup and have decided to take people along with me as I begin to chase the surface. The first 7 parts have been posted on you tube. You can get to my channel by clicking in this LINK to see the series so far. I will try to post something every few days after I complete work at each stage of  working the design into the cup’s surface.

Here is a ‘preview’ in the form of Parts 3 and 4 where I sketch in the design to see the it in place before making final adjustments. I intend to take you along with these videos using real time where it isn’t boring and showing all the steps it takes to finish a cup, even when I misstep. I am still a student but I have been doing this long enough to know that I can correct or improvise when necessary to complete the project, even if it goes awry or veers from the original plan.

I feel like I passed a milestone last night, there are now over 200 people subscribing to my YouTube Channel.  It’s been gratifying to have such a positive response to my work on line. I enjoy making the videos, they and the response to them, give me as much satisfaction as teaching a class or workshop.

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.

It’s been a week of making invitation samples for a client and finishing up the silver wine cup. Silver work had stopped because there were too many pressing demands from my binding work and I needed time to redesign the bottom of the cup. The next designs will not take so long to complete. This cup and its design has taught me a lot. Here’s the new design for the bottom, chased into the cup, I have also started to accentuate the lines and push background down from the flower.

The beginning of this cup is in the April 20th entry of this blog. You could also just click on the word chasing in the word cloud to the right of this entry to see it. It will appear right after this entry, replacing the rest of the July stuff.

You can see I still have trouble making a small circle, I think the curve chaser is too rounded, it tends to dig into the metal I’m chasing instead of traveling smoothly where I strike it. I should make another tool. The large curves are made with the tool designed for straight lines.

After the basic chasing was done, I took the red pitch out of the cup and cleaned it so that I could work from the inside of the cup.

I have made two Snarling Irons. The first one was for pushing larger general forms out from the surface of the cup. The second one, with the narrower top, was made because I couldn’t get to areas near the base in the inside of the cup. Its uneven, angled face was meant to get into the corner where the sides of the cup meet the base.  It worked  pretty well.

Here’s what the inside looked like after the snarling irons were used. The darker parts inside the cup are  where the snarling irons polished the surface as areas were struck and pushed out by the iron’s vibrations. I used repoussè tools to expand the volume of the flower in the bottom.

On Gennady’s advice, I put black pitch into the cup with a large dowel so that I could hold the cup in a vise. The black pitch is more resilient and should allow me to produce a greater depth of relief in the design.  In this photo the cup is held in a vise  by its dowel extension so that I can work on the sides.

I’m working on the bottom here and in the following photo. The flower rose way too much above the plane of the cup base.  After I removed the pitch I was able to knock it back down so that the cup could rest on a table like it should.  It was scary and risky but I know how to do it now if it ever happens again.

Here are photos of the finished cup. There’s probably some final polishing to do but this is where it is now.

The bottom medallion.

The inside.

This is the first part of chasing the sterling silver wine cup that I raised from a disk a little while ago. I delayed the work on this cup because I wanted to have a mold made so that I could have blanks raised by metal spinning that would meet the size that I needed. Here’s a photo of the one I raised by hand and the copy I had made from the new mold. Mine is on the right. 

I used the surface gauge to mark the final height at 75 mm and then used shears to trim the cups down to equal size.  The off cuts will become a cuff and parts for a bracelet.

Then I used the surface gauge to mark up the borders on one cup.  This is the first time I am working in 18 gauge silver so I am taking it slowly and trying to be as accurate as I can.  I decided to decorate this cup with my first design.  It’s a simpler than a later design that I really want to do but the later design requires me to make repoussè  circles with which I have not hadmuch success.  Once the horizontal lines were in place I divided the bottom into 12 parts and extended lines up the sides with a triangle and a sharpie.  Mylar stencilswere made from my original drawing and I laid them out with an erasable sharpie onto the cup. This is a large photo to show  most of my work surface.

Here is the cup with the bottom panel drawn in, I used the stencils again when I drew the design with the scratch awl, then I drew the border the same way.

Everything was scratched in and I began working with the chasing tool.

Once all the lines were chased in I began to press the background down on one side of the chased lines to give the leaves some relief.

Now the background is being pushed down evenly.  I decided not to texture it yet because there is some snarling in the cup’s future.  After it is snarled it will have to be annealed which will soften the whole cup, detailing after that will make it hard and usable again, if I do it now, it will mean that I will have to do it again which will leave undesirable double impressions.

The background is down and the leaves begin to get some sculptural detail.

 The background of the border has to be lowered as well as the bottom part of the cup.

Then I began to matte the border background.

The border has been matted and I have begun to close the lip just a little. I want to sketch in a design on the bottom before I remove the pitch.  When I showed this at school last Friday, Gennady , Rebekah and Michael all said, at different times, that I need to lift the leaves and border out more. They can’t all be wrong, I was satisfied with the relief so far  but after I saw the difference in the lotus bowl I understand what they were expecting of the piece. That’s the reason I started the lotus bowl over the weekend. I wasn’t sure how much the snarling iron would change the relief on this cup. I don’t want it getting too wide or fat. When I start to detail the leaves I know that it will go in a bit so I guess it makes sense to push out more first. 

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I’ll start with a photo I took at the Edison Mall Pet store last week end. We were there to buy some shoes but I like to stop into the pet store see the puppies and thought we might find another toy for Henry, he seems to need something on which to teethe. In the back of the store I saw these gerbils sleeping together in their little hut.

In class last Thursday I managed to get two rounds in on the silver wine cup. Here it is after the second round. Top diameter 140mm.

After the third round. Top diameter 136mm. I should have been able to close it more than 4mm.

I set the base and when Gennady looked at it he said he was disturbed to see new marks inside the bottom, there should be only old marks, he intimated that those should be fading. I said that I only just set the bottom, he said that I was changing position while doing it which is fundamentally wrong, I should be striking in one spot on the stake while rotating the base and then everything would be a smooth curve with no marks. He was right, I had changed position several times trying to adjust my strikes on the stake. I’ll straighten it out next time I set the base. Here’s the cup with the 4th round started, class ended before I could complete the round. 

While the annealed silver was in the pickle, I asked Gennady to show me how to use a snarling iron on one of my copper cups. I want to do some chasing and he said that I needed to raise the surface because the chasing would contract the vessel so that it would hold less.

The snarling iron works from the inside of a vessel. This is the set up with the snarling iron clamped into a vise. The cup is held with the ball end inside it and the iron is struck with a heavy hammer near the vise which causes the ball to vibrate, hammering the cup from its inside.

He demonstrated, I couldn’t see how much pressure was being applied to the cup at the end of the iron. Fortunately it was easy to see and figure out just where to drop the hammer, too close to the vise and there is little vibration, further away it gets wild, the sweet spot seems to be just about 3 inches from the bend in the vise. Unfortunately it took about a half hour to figure out how firmly to hold the cup against the ball end. I started by holding it as firmly as I would if I was striking it against a stake. Wrong idea, the cup was really difficult to control and began to look as if it had a case of mumps. It turns out that the hold should be light, position is the important thing. I am trying to raise the whole surface, except for borders at the base and lip. With a light hold on the cup, each drop of the hammer vibrates the iron and the surface is pushed out, the cup is slightly rotated and the hammer dropped again to raise another spot next to the one just raised. That’s the theory, the practice is much more difficult. One has to hold the cup at a specific point in space while raising and dropping the hammer in an awkward position; because the iron is striking from the inside one sees only the effect, not the attack, constant vigilance and a steady hand are required. This is what I was able to do, next week I will try to even it up a bit, I was told we would ‘regulate the surface’ in the next step. . .

The days are getting shorter and the trip home, even as the hour has not changed, seems to be later in the day. Thursday I was treated to a spectacular sunset as I rode the ferry back to Staten Island.  When the sun was low and red it becomes a glittering coral city, the Empire State Building is clad with ribbons of reflective metal that show up in this light.  

Here’s a view of the whole skyline in the pre storm sky, and then a panorama from New Jersey to Brooklyn  with the statue of Liberty that I put together from several separate shots. 

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.