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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.

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 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.

The pieces were annealed. I worked on the inside of the bowl (bottom part of this container) with the hook hammer, starting at the rim and working my way down to the base with closely spaced hammer strikes.  About a third of the way down I switched to a sand bag and continued working toward the base.

I began to close the top some more.  The hook hammer was used to harden  and round the dome from the inside,  then I used the raising hammer and stake to close it all the way to the rim.

When I finished. the rims of both the bowl and its cover were practically the same diameter, they balanced on each other.  I annealed them again.

I wanted  to  push the sides of the bowl out some more and close the rim so that it would fit inside the cover.  I used the surface gauge to mark the inside with three rings to guide my hammering. I set the base again to work harden the edge.

Then I began to hammer the middle part of the bowl from the inside on the sand bag.

In the left side of the  following photo  I have just started to raise and close the rim. When I finished raising and closing I gave the whole outside a light planishing  to smooth out the sounded surface. Then I began to work on the cover (top part).

I closed the top half of the top with my raising hammer on the T stake and I used the hook hammer to push a shoulder out from the inside starting in the depression on a stump, finishing on the sand bag.  The surface gauge was used to mark a height on the bowl and I used a pair of dividers to mark the rim of the top.  Both pieces were trimmed with shears.

More shaping and regulating has to be done because the symmetry is not regular.  I also want to solder sterling wire rims to both pieces before I can start the decorative chasing and repousse.

Here’s a comparison shot of the coupled piece at the beginning, middle and the end of this entry.  More to follow as this project continues.

This is a test piece for the repoussè class.  I already know something about how it is supposed to work and have a few tools that I made to work on the back of the pieces. Gennady  showed me a book on colonial silversmithing a couple of weeks ago when I asked about making the saucers for the wine cups. The book showed how a round plate was set on the edge of a board and two flat topped nails were hammered into the board as stops that would determine the distance or width of the plate’s rim. As you turn a flat disk of metal against the nails you strike the plate near the edge of the board displacing the metal downwards making the center of the plate.  I did that with a circle of copper in school and it seemed to work. This weekend I did it again with a square of copper bronze.  The square isn’t very sharp  and the impression is deeper than I will need for the saucer,  I was taking this opportunity to push the metal as far as I could without making a bowl. 

In preparation for the class and the anticipated project I made this frame for the pitch and a mylar stencil for my snake pin.  It just happened to be the right size for the edges of my square plate.  After setting the plate into the pitch I scribed the snake onto the plate on each side of the plate’s rim. Here it is with 1 side chased in, one side with half of the snake chased  and 2 sides still showing the scribe marks.  As you can see I still have trouble chasing long straight lines along the edges.  

All of the drawing has been chased in and I did a little stamping inside the edges of the depression to clean it up a little.

I heated the pitch to remove the plate, cleaned it with turpentine, annealed it and set it back onto the pitch with the backside up. I had to pour some pitch into the depression before turning it over onto the pitch frame so that I was sure that the pitch was filling all the spaces under the metal with no bubbles or trapped air. It was interesting hammering the tools into the lines to push the snakes and rocks above the top surface of the plate rim. Here I have done two sides. You can see the chased lines on the other two sides. 

When I finished with the animals. I found the center and used the center punch to make a small mark, from there I drew three circles.  One to make a boss and two to outline a ring. I chased the ring into the surface. When I do this again I won’t chase anything on the back, it doesn’t seem to be necessary and it creates a doubled border on the front that is hard to reconcile.

I used my punches to push the metal down into the pitch, I didn’t have the right tools for these marks yet.

The plate was removed from the pitch, cleaned and annealed.  I figured that I could do the matting directly on a steel block and would be able to avoid the pitch for the next bit of decoration.  I’d also be able to straighten the edges out.  They had gottten a little warped on the pitch. A few taps with a rawhide mallet and I was able to tape the plate edge to the steel block. Here it is just after I started to matte the areas around the snakes. 

After the rim was matted I taped the whole plate to the block and used a medium sized nail punch to texture the background around my  ’top view’ of Saturn.  Here it is just after I released the tapes.

The plate was annealed again and I put it back onto the pitch. The first bit of repoussè was lumpy and I wanted to see if I could make things smoother.  I also had to make three new tools specifically for the width of the snake’s body and the ring. I also made a bigger punch in hopes that I’d be able to smooth out the big center boss. Edges on the tools and the doming of the surface are important. One of the tools works really well, the big one has to be changed some how.  Here are some of the tools that I have made. The rough faced tools are for matting, the smooth faces are for repoussè, and the small punches are for detailing.

One of the things I noticed is that the metal seems to work harden an area larger than the tool mark. Perhaps even as much as a quarter inch around the mark. It makes annealing necessary even if you are only working on a part of your design. Earlier in this process I had to anneal the plate to use the matte tool near chasing lines, the surface just wasn’t accepting the tool marks like it should have. this was taken while I was reworking the deeper parts of the plate.

Annealed, straightened  and back on the pitch for touch up and final decoration. The snakes should have eyes and  perhaps some scales. I made two more tools from small tool steel stock to punch triangular and v-shaped  marks for scales (they’re in the photo above). The smoothing out was good but not perfect, it also tended to open the metal at the chase lines giving the figures a bright outline.  I tried to matte some of them down but it was too much of an open space, so it will have to stay. Those lines will probably become darkened as the piece ages.

This is a close-up of the details after they were tapped in to the plate followed by a shot of the whole thing still in the pitch.

Heated and removed from the pitch, I wiped the plate to get excess pitch off of it and then put it into a turpentine bath to remove the rest. The copper seems to turn the turps green.

I followed this with a brass brush and  detergent to make it ready for the final finishing touches.  Edges had to be straightened and filed and there were a few spots that needed a punch or two on the steel block. All finished.

It was only yesterday that the NY Times wrote an article about a show in a Columbia University Gallery. “Delight in Design” is a show of silver tableware from India made during the Raj. Didn’t think I was going to go but I decided last night that I would make the effort. It was the last day and it was something I needed to see. The Wallach Gallery opened at 1:00 this afternoon and I made it up to 116th street and found the gallery by about 1:30. I was fortunate to find the curator, Vidya Dehejia was there talking with one of her friends and taking him through the show. Following along, I got a lot of interesting insights about the culture in India at the time of the British occupation. A few other people joined the impromptu tour and had questions of their own which enriched our knowledge of the times and people around the silver in the show. Here’s a photo of Vidya.

A number of people showed up having read the Times article (Last Chance) and all of them were as surprised as I was that we hadn’t heard about it, it’s been open since the middle of September. This is the first piece that greeted us as we entered the galleries. It is made with spectacularly deep repoussè work, on closer examination I saw a number of holes where the metal may have been worked too hard or it may have worn through over the ages, but none of the flaws took away from the drama of the piece. 

What I wanted to examine here is the insides of the vessels, here’s a shot of another slightly smaller bowl with a shot of the inside which shows how deep the repoussè work is.

  Here are a few shots of the gallery and a case or two.

The rocking chair in this case is a wine bottle holder. There’s a circular hole in the seat so that the bottle can rest on the rungs. 

Here are a few details of pieces I like. The first piece is their PR centerpiece in the Kashmir style, it is remarkably sculptural with a pierced base. This double shot was put together from the gallery web site. I took the shots of the accompanying plate, decorated with the same pattern, showing front and back and another shot of the inside of the large bowl.

A bowl decorated with animals representing the days of the week, I’ll have to read the catalog to get more information. 

I like this image of an elephant and Tiger, it’s on a tankard that’s covered with animals surrounded by foliage and flowers.  

 There are many more pieces I liked (especially the little pepper pots) but this is enough for this post, you can see the whole show by clicking on this word

Delight

which will take you to the Wallach Gallery page for this exhibition. There are slide shows that take you through the regional styles of decoration and show almost all the pieces in the galleries.  

There’s also a great catalog available. One of the other visitors said you can find it on Amazon too.  It’s $65 in hard cover. 

The WordPress disaster seems to be a little over.  I have deleted the tinymice file from my server and I looked in the uploads folder and I saw that all the photos I had uploaded again and again last night were there. They were not going into the post, so there must be an interface problem. I deleted about 40 copies of various photos from my server uploads folder to only leave the original photos. Exporting them to my desk top proved that they were not ghosts on the server. Then I looked in the media library and saw thumbnails of the photos, this is the first one I was able to get into the post.

These are a set of samples of tableware that was made from one of my designs. They are finally in the market place. I am working toward getting some more samples and making some sales. They turned out well and I would like to see some more color ways.  

Here’s a close up of the red set. The white design is a pearlescent interpretation of some of my stamped pattern work.

 Last week Colman and I went into the city to attend the MJSA Expo at the Javitts Center. We are looking for people to help us cast and finish the flatware and napkin rings. We made a few contacts that may prove helpful when I finally finish the first two napkin rings and begin on my spoons and knives to go along with the fork I’ve already made.  While we were there it was hard to ignore the enormous piles of stones and beads, this is after all, a jewelers supply show. I managed to get some silicone mold material for my last casting class project. We were looking at a vast collection of cabochons presented by the Village Silversmith out of Massachusetts. These were the most unusual things I saw at the show, 5 million year old sand dollar fossils, small enough to be used for rings and bracelets. There were a lot of inexpensive examples that had their full sculpture and dull colored shells as their surface, these, I think are examples of what you can find when you remove the shell and expose the minerals that replaced the animal inside. Some of the shell remains as a star on the surface. The silversmith called these the “fancy colored” and charged a lot more for them. They’re about a half inch and more in diameter. I picked up a number of quartz cabochons and Colman found a nice star sapphire at another vendor’s display.

On the way back home the ferry used one of the slips closer to the west side of the terminal so that we disembarked at a side of the terminal that has enormous windows that look out on to the harbor.  I took this shot.

This is what the window looks like in the passageway.

While we were taking pictures our neighbor Diana appeared and we left the terminal together.