Merging blogs

Today we had our first day of real snow. It has grown dark now, and big flakes are still swirling outside.

The view from my living room window this afternoon

I come back from my last day of work. After being unemployed for a few months, which I cannot say was too bad since it gave me plenty of time for knitting and designing, I worked for three weeks at a 3D printing company, in the finishing department. This proved a bit too hard on my joints and, still in my temporary test period, I had to stop. The job and the people were cool and for that I am a little sad, but I am also happy that the pain in my joints and the foreboding of injuries to come have been lifted from my shoulders. My last two days were part-time and I already feel improvement, which is a relief.

On to a new start. I have decided to study, to obtain some certifications that may help me find a job that I will find interesting and that won't be too physically demanding. Meanwhile, I will pursue knitwear design in full. It hasn't worked too badly for me, and I am hopeful.

These last months, enamel and jewellery-making have taken a back seat. I see a trend in my interest, related to the seasons, and I tend to knit more in winter, and enamel more in summer (to the extent that I stop the other activity altogether!). I am not too sure that this is actually related to the weather, since enamelling in summer is much warmer than holding some yarn in your fingers :) but perhaps there is something to it.

I haven't been knitting for that long, just since March 2009 (it really seems like yesterday!) and I still have to break this summer curse. Last years I wasn't too serious about it, but this next summer I will try harder. I do love lighter knits, too. Although I have to say, I am very fond of winter :)

Perhaps, decompartimentalizing (is that a word??) would help. In this spirit, I have decided to merge my blogs, and have just imported all my knitting entries over to this one. I was posting in either one or the other, it appears, and I did not post all that much anyway, so I do not see the point of keeping both. I would merge my websites but... I still haven't made my knitting website. Which is a good thing since I would have to merge them now! So I will simply redesign my website and include everything in it. I hope to work on this this weekend. Deadlines do not agree with me so I will see if I finish :) more likely that I finish if I don't stress over deadlines.

If I am honest there is also another reason why enamel and jewellery-making have fallen to the back-burner. Simply, enamelled jewellery of the kind I make is very difficult to sell. It involves many work hours, costly materials, and why not say it, a lot of knowledge and experience I had to gain after many years of work.
This is not too obvious in the finished work, cheap copies could easily be mass produced in cheaper materials (if only the style was trendy anyway) and most people probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. At least from internet pictures. I totally understand that and I do not imply that because of my work's intrinsic value people should fall over their feet to buy it. I do it because I like it, and if people don't like it, or don't think it is worth so much, or can't afford it, that's fine. But I do find it more difficult to dedicate myself to it fully because of this. Not least of all because I need to invest a significant amount of resources in materials and tools alone. Knitwear design in this respect is more fulfilling.

I do have another idea that has been lurking at the back of my mind and that I would like to realize at some point, sooner than later. I have dabbled in shawl-pins, gifted most, sold a few, kept a pair. They were just prototypes, and beaded. I would actually like to expand in this idea, perhaps sell them. I would like to include enamel in them, although this is technically difficult (enamelling involves firing at high temperatures which softens the metal, so it would have to be forged after enamelling, which endangers the enamel), I want to try. Cast may be a solution, but this would make the pins too heavy.
I think about stitch markers too. We will see :)

Black Series, for "Heavy Metal" expo, NovaBelgica Art Gallery, 30 Sep - 6 Nov 2011

Image © Trëz Orb

Skull I, 2005

Skull III (crow skull)

Skull III (crow skull)

All images clickable.

For the last weeks, with vacation breaks and other interruptions, I have been working on a little collection for a local exhibition here in Belgium.

I am very excited about this because of the theme and title, which is open to interpretation as if referring to the material or the music - both two of my great passions.
When I first heard about it I just had to ask Tim (gallery owner, whose blacksmith and sculpture work I really admire) to please let me participate! which he kindly did.

Skull X

Skull V (cat skull)

Radius and Ulna lariat

Venus Sigil

I have to say at first I had trouble coming up with designs. I was just too worried about it I think :D but that was just a temporary madness ;) as a main collection, I decided to go for a black series -and that is the very original title I am giving to it- and go back to a theme with which I consider I started to really find my own language, which is the skull (see Skull I above, from 2005), not so much because of the figure itself, but because it sort of set the tone for my work.

Skull IV

I decided to really focus on the skull itself again, and pick up where I left (after all I had only made two Skulls before!) and continue with Skull III to Skull X, and a few other sort of related subjects. You can imagine my delighted surprise when I saw the flyer for the exposition featuring a skull as well.

For this series I wanted to keep the work hours down and the pieces affordable, so I omitted more elaborate hand-fabricated settings. This also allowed me to produce more pieces in a relatively short time which I think kept the entire series quite consistent. I really, really enjoyed making these, most of all -no susprise there- the enamel work.

At the end of the day... I wonder why I have not made more pieces in this style, since it is actually the kind of stuff I like to wear the most :) this should be remedied and I think I will continue the series in the future.

Chalk Pentagram

TBC II, 2009

Skull IX (skull cup)

Skull VII (baby skull)

So, speaking about the enamel, I chose a white over black technique. This is against what we learned in school for vitrifiable paints (onglaze, china paints): build up darker colours over a white or light opaque background. Already back in school days, I remember making a little palette of the colours over opaque black, to see how it worked. It is certainly not possible to attain the same level of detail this way, especially with colour, but I think it is still valid, especially for certain subjects, in my opinion it fits these skull and bone designs pretty well.


I worked with a very oily mix on several pieces (for example Skull III, V, VII, X), which invites to paint more spontaneously, almost like with watercolour, and also allows a fluid line for symbols (Venus Sigil, Diabolical Sigil I), but then poses challenges when it comes to evaporating the oil and firing. I should make tests in the future with more volatile oils, but I am afraid the fluidity will also be affected.
A second or third fire with a mix heavier on the pigment helped achieve a little more detail here and there. I don't think any of the pieces has more than 4 fires (after the initial opaque base of black, which adds 2 to 4 more fires) which must be a record for me :)

For other pieces (for example Skull IV, IX) I worked exclusively with a thicker mix, and I could achieve quite a bit of detail and subtler shadings.


I also experimented with white conté crayons (Chalk Skull, Diabolical Sigil II). I wanted to achieve a chalk graffiti effect, and the white conté crayon worked prefectly. I found three different fragments of crayon in my old school bag, and one of them worked much better than the others. I hope I can find this sort of crayon again in the future if I feel like using it again, although I think its use is limited. In my rather brief investigation as to the composition of the crayons, it may mainly be kaolin clay and wax.
I worked over a matte ground surface, then fired, and to my surprise the colour was fixed to the enamel, and kept part of its gritty texture.

Diabolical Sigil II

Diabolical Sigil I

Spine

group picture

For the necklace parts, I chose sterling silver patinated black and black glass to keep it monochrome, a combination I had already used for TBC II (which I will probably also show in the exhibition, together with TBC III, 2010). A few pieces have onyx substituting for black glass, and/or grey and black banded marble/jasper.

For a few smaller pieces I used only copper and non-precious metal chains to keep costs down.

26 June 2011

It has been a while! I haven't been keeping up with these entries. I had forgotten about it to be honest!

Today I decided to change slightly the way I do my jewellery. I should in fact work on two (three) pieces I have started, to submit for two exhibitions. One is nearly finished, the other in the same series I had to start over with, and the last is well underway.

But sometimes we just get the urge to do something new, right? I especially do when something is not working out, I then move on to another thing, and after a bit I have renewed energy to face the problematic piece.

So what I have been doing today is...

No... not playing with a monocle. Well, sort of ;)

I have been working on a "master" setting of sorts. I normally produce more enamels than I can ever set, for several reasons: because I prefer enamelling, because I am better at it, because I am lazy about making settings, because I am out of this or that kind of silver, etc.

Working with rich low brass

So I have decided to make a few settings of the shapes I most commonly use, and then have a mold and casts made out of it (silver and possibly bronze as well). This does limit a bit the shape and size of the coppers I make, but after going through my sketch books, I did see certain shapes recurring often, with very slight differences in shape or size. I also thought, that when you buy a painting, you don't necessarily ask for a frame to be done from scratch to suit that particular painting! that can be done sometimes, but for more special pieces.

So, I narrowed down to a number of shapes, and I got started with my first setting. With cast settings, I hope to speed up my production!

Not a round one in fact! Round settings are easy enough to make that I don't think I will make a mold of one.
Shaping both elements into a circle makes it easier to fit them to each other in order to solder them together.
I will then split it again and work the shape I want.
The little piece to the left, though, that was a trickier soldering operation:

First soldering rings to the sheet, then:

Soldering the entire thing to half round wire.

At which point I took a break to eat something and write this down :) back to the workbench!

Edit:

Taking shape. This is all for today though. 

Falciot

 

Graphite and enamel over copper, sterling silver, agate beads, and three glass beads (the grey ones at the center and the drop at the back).

2.5cm diameter. 48 cm long necklace.