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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.

This is the silver cup I’ve been working on for some time now, other projects and dissatisfaction with the progress have delayed my working on it through the summer. I decided to work on this without pitch for the time being until I need to do final sculptural details. It works much better and I am happier with the progress.

If you go to my channel on YouTube,  you’ll find 7 videos that lead up to this one. I’ll make more as the cup comes to its finish.

This video also introduces snarling irons, these are ones that I made, the traditional irons are much longer. I didn’t need them to be so long to work on my cups. The traditional irons are for working on larger vessels and proved awkward for these comparatively shallow cups.

Since I have been making my wine cups, I have had to make a lot of my own tools. The studio snarling irons at FIT, while they have good heads on them, were too long for work on my short cups. Gennady and I made the first one about a year and a half ago, I have made many more since then with different heads for different designs on the cups. I made the  horizontal and vertical liners about 3 weeks ago.

These tools were made of different shaped tool steel that I bought at Metalliferous,  I filed and polished the ends before bending the  steel into the snarling iron shape.  All of the stock was about 12 inches or 30 cm, long.  On some tools I bent the working head up with a neck too long.  It works but I suspect I might be able to get a stronger vibration if the iron has a longer body.  At the base you need a full inch and a half to  two inches for the vise to clamp onto.

Here’s a side view of the collection. The hammer in the photo is the one I use on the irons when I’m working on a cup.

Last week Colman and I were shopping for miniature vise grips at Lowe’s and I found a set of center punches and a set of chisels in their bargain bins. They looked like perfect candidates for repoussè tools.  They were 2 or 3 dollars for each set of three.

I took them to class and Gennady said that they were okay to grind without  relieving  the temper.  In this shot, I have already ground the sharp points off of the center punches and the chisels are  as I bought them.

After grinding the basic shape, I was able to file them down into more usable shapes.  In this photo the round ones have been started with the file and the flat tools are like they were off of the grinding wheel.

The tool on the right show how far I took filing the round shape, the others show grinder marks. After that I polished them with 1200 grit  emery paper.

Here they all are after final polishing, after I use them I will see if I want to reshape them, that can be done on the run.

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.

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.