It's a good thing I have the liver of a teetotaling teenager (according to my doctor) as I had more than two glasses of wine tonight to relax after moving three metal cabinets into the conservatory/jewelry studio/wet studio and rearranging all the furniture in there. I don't know what to call that room. It's a little glass greenhouse added onto the side of the house, and it has a tile floor with a drain in the middle of it (and a sink on one wall) so I can refer to it as the wet studio. It's also where I set up my jewelry bench and torch. Oh and my soap making and bookbinding materials. And ikebana tools and books. And all the tools I don't have a workbench or a shop for yet (they're still in boxes until I get the inside tool room and the wood shop set up).
Today I unpacked three or four boxes, cleared some of the floor off, and got ready to think about making jewelry in there. I say thinking about as last night jewelry class did not go very well and I am still feeling a bit beaten up from it. I posted a picture yesterday afternoon of the bracelet I have been working on and it was at the first level of polish. I took it all the way to final polish and started to set the stones when I ran into a problem: The bezel settings were too work-hardened to bend so I had to hammer the bezels around the stones. Unfortunately, hammering caused the big bezel to break away from the cuff in two places and I had to start all over again with the soldering, stone-setting and polishing. This time I will polish the silver after the stones are set so the metal doesn't get to hard to bend.
No glass was done today. I hold out hope for tomorrow--especially as the woman in China who sold me the glow-in-the-dark mineral pigment in June keeps prodding me to tell her how it fired. I need to get on that so I have a result for her--and for me too (though it doesn't look like we'll be remodeling our bathroom anytime soon).
Now it's time to head off to drink a lot of water, take my diabetes med, and get some sleep. Good night moon.
1 comment:
Chalk the jewelry issue up to learning the ropes of the skills. Most folks don't make things perfectly the first time out, anyway.
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