Jewelry Day

Today is my most creatively-focused day in recent memory. With the exception of filling out our benefits forms for the annual open enrollment, I have been working in some form or art or other all day. I started the morning with a piano lesson. I am working on a Bach prelude and it is seriously kicking my butt, but today my head broke through the clouds and I was able to catch mistakes as I made them because of sound, not sight reading.

As soon as I finished piano I hopped in the car and headed to the Creative Side Jewelry Academy for a four-hour open studio session to make up for the class I missed Monday night. Today was all about polishing and finishing. Fussy work that nonetheless has its own zen and joy. I was hoping to get the stones set in the bracelet I have been working on for a few weeks, but I still have one polish left. I am going to do the final polish first thing at tonight's class before it officially starts so I can get help from the instructor on getting the stones into the bezels. The actual setting (clamping the bezel down around the stones) I can do at home later this week as I have the tools. After I get the bracelet done, I'll do the last soldering (of the bead post and safety clasp) for the silver hollow-form ring I'm working on.

If I get those two projects done I'll be caught up and ready to start on the final project for the class: A kinetic sculptural necklace. I am going to do a large hollow pendant that has a couple of hinged doors on the front which open to reveal tube-set stones on the inside. I am thinking to use citrine and maybe some of the sapphires I had cut from our mining adventure in Montana this past summer for the stones as I would like to use real stones, and citrine is the only real faceted stone we have available in class. Coincidentally, Dave and Jessie's birthstones are citrine and sapphire so I can see a family-love-theme thing going.

One of the last projects I was working on at the Spruill Center For the Arts when I was taking jewelry classes there with Mom and Becky was a copper hollow-form heart with the first-name initials of my family members showing through swiss-cheese like holes in the front of the piece. I never did finish it, but I could see doing it now.

Now off to class to create some more!