Natural Silver Specimens
Posted by Administrator on Sep 26, 2006
Considering how much time I spend working with silver, on an almost daily basis, you’d think I might have spent some time learning about where silver comes from, and what it looks like naturally.
For whatever reason, it never occurred to me. I grew up in California, and spent time as a child touring the gold country, so I’ve seen my fair share of gold nuggets, but not silver. Over the weekend, I ran across an article about natural silver in an old copy of Lapidary Journal (from around 5-6 years ago) that featured some images of natural silver. It’s beautiful! The specimens shown in the magazine reminded me of roots, or vines, the way they seemed to be growing and twisting around each other. They were like intricate little organic metal sculptures; in other words, the exact kind of imagery that has inspired many of my silver wire designs. I had no idea I was immitating nature in such a literal sense! Of course, now I’m even more inspired to work on fused silver sculptures, with the images of silver specimens in my mind as inspiration.
Anyway, here are some links to pictures of silver specimens. In addition to the vine-like sculptural specimens that inspired me to look, it comes in various crystal formations too.
Google image search for “Silver Specimens”
mineralgallery.com
irocks.com
Caring for Freeform Pendants
Posted by Administrator on Sep 15, 2006
I make a lot of sculptural freeform pendants out of sterling silver wire.
Because my designs are ‘open’ in structure, I make a point of using fairly thick wire so that the jewelry won’t easily get pulled out of shape. I have a few other tricks to make the pieces durable, but it is possible to bend them out of shape if they are not properly cared for. A few tips:
- My jewelry won’t bend out of shape if it’s dropped, but it will if you step on it, and might if it snags on something while you are in the crawlspace underneath your home and it’s too dark to figure out how to unsnag it (this actually happened to one of my customers!).
- Store your jewelry in a box when you aren’t wearing it, so that if something heavy happens to fall on it, it won’t get crushed - this is a good idea for all jewelry, by the way, not just sculptural pieces.
- Don’t wear jewelry you love during activities like wrestling and gynmastics, where the possibility of it being squished under you, or worse, pulled off of your body, is high.
- Don’t wear jewelry while showering or using chemical cleaning products or hair products - a lot of people don’t know about this, but the chemicals in household cleaning products and beauty products such as hairspray can react with silver and cause it to tarnish very rapidly. Put on jewelry after you finish doing your hair, and remove it while cleaning, to keep it shiny longer
- Wipe your silver jewelry with a polishing cloth now and then. Besides removing light tarnish and dirt, this helps prevent tarnish from forming.
- If the piece contains pearls, browse the “jewelry care” and “pearls” sections of my blog for tips on caring for pearl jewelry.
Accidents happen of course - but if you use common sense and remove your jewelry during strenuous physical activities, it should last for many years. And if you do accidentally damage a piece of sculptural jewelry that I made, please let me know so that I can fix it for you. I want you to be able to wear my jewelry and enjoy it for a very long time, so I don’t mind helping out occasionally with maintenance.
Charm necklace is HERE!
Posted by Administrator on Sep 14, 2006
The collaborative charm necklace I’ve been writing about recently arrived today. I am so excited! I’d seen pictures of all of the charms, as well as the finished necklace, but that’s nothing like seeing it in person.
A few things that look way better in person:
-the clay charms: I didn’t realize they had sparkle, and so much color variance
-the beaded charms: pictures don’t catpure the depth and detail in designs created with small seed beads
-the necklace overall: holding it and trying it on, I really could appreciate the work Cyndi put in placing all the charms to make the necklace have equal weight on both sides, blending all the colors, etc.
Now I’m realizing that I could go on and on…really, it’s all better in person, and the more I look at each charm, the more I like them. I feel honored to be part of this talented group of women.
I’m tentatively planning on wearing the necklace at the Ravenswood Artist Marketplace on October 7th, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to wait that long!
Show Announcement
Posted by Administrator on Sep 13, 2006
I’m doing a show in October in Sonoma, CA at the Ravenswood winery.
It is their first “Artist Marketplace” and I have no idea what to expect, but I think it will be fun. Wineries tend to be very beautiful places, and October is the perfect time of year to spend an afternoon outdoors in the wine country.
If you feel like doing some wine tasting and art shopping, it is Saturday afternoon on October 7th at Ravenswood.
Another event that might be of interest is the Visual Aid Big Deal in SF. It is a fundraising event for Visual Aid, which supports artists with life threatening illnesses. Lots of artists donate work to this event, which is going to be on November 11. All art sells for $150 so you might be able to get a bargain on some great work. I’ll post some more details a little bit closer to the actual date.
Can fashion be copyrighted?
Posted by Administrator on Sep 13, 2006
The NY Times ran an article earlier this week about copyright laws and how they apply to fashion. Since I’ve written about copying a couple of times now, I was very interested to read about some of the legal issues. The article talks about clothing designs being copied, but the same issues apply to jewelry.
Apparently, a bill (which is not expected to pass) is going to Congress that would allow designers to copyright their designs and provide some legal protection against people making inexpensive knock-offs.
I have no idea how they plan to enforce this, even if it does pass, given that so much of design (in clothing as well as jewelry) is influenced by current trends, and also given that so many millions of designs have already been created at one time or another. It seems like it would be very hard to prove that a design was truly original. I think it is a nice idea to provide some protection for designers, though.
I can’t find a link to the article at the moment (and you have to be a member to read the Times online) but I’m curious to see where this goes.
Has everything already been done?
Posted by Administrator on Sep 7, 2006
Whenever the debate about creativity, copying, and inspiration comes up on jewelry forums, it gets heated right around the time someone says that “everything has been done already anyway” or “there’s nothing new under the sun”.
People (myself included) don’t want this to be true, because we consider ourselves to be creative, and even on some days, artists. Our work is original, and how dare anyone say it’s not?
Here’s the thing - every time I’ve come up with something I thought was completely new, I later found out someone else, somewhere in the world, had done something similar at some point in time. Not identical, but similar. And really, should I be surprised?
I thought my freeform pendants were really cutting edge, really new. I soon found out that I wasn’t the first person who thought it would be fun to twist some wire around in an abstract form and add a bead or two. Does that mean I wasn’t being creative or original? No, just that other people have had similar thought processes that resulted in similar looking jewelry. Most of the freeform wire jewelry I’ve seen doesn’t look quite like mine. Some of it I love, some of it I’m not impressed by, but I love the freeform technique, and that it lends itself to pieces turning out a little bit different every time. If I can’t be completely unique, at least I can keep coming up with new twists on things.
Same thing happened after I started doing my fused sculptural pieces in fine silver. I stumbled across a website of someone who also thought it was really fun to melt metal into abstract shapes. Again, hers didn’t look quite like mine - she’d used the technique differently - but there was the same twinge of disappointment from knowing that my idea wasn’t quite as original as I thought it was.
Argentium was the next thing I got excited about - new metal, not many people have worked with it, maybe I’d come up with a really, really new idea. That wasn’t in the cards either. Yes, Argentium has some properties that make the style of work I do easier, and yes, you wouldn’t work with sterling quite the same way (or fine silver) but the basic techniques are still things that people have been doing for a long time.
Finally when I started doing resin work, I came up with a way to use a basic technique for jewelry that really couldn’t have been done before. I cut out details from printes of my husband’s art and set them in found object bezels. Totally unique, right? Except that it wasn’t me who figured out you could set images behind resin, that’s a commonly used technique.
So I’ve come to accept the fact that, no matter how much I innovate and push the boundaries of my creativity and skill, there will be elements in my work that strongly resemble work that other people have done or are doing. I’ve decided that I have to be okay with that, and it doesn’t make my work boring or unoriginal. My jewelry does tend to be pretty unique, at least the more experimental stuff. And because of the processes I use, I’m almost guaranteed to come up with something that’s not identical to something anyone else has ever made. Even if other people have used the same techniques and materials. There is room for innovation, and as designers/artists, we have to figure out ways to keep innovating in spite of the fact that we are working with materials, ideas, and techniques that aren’t brand new.
My dream, of course, would be to discover a completely new material for jewelry and exploit all of its unique characteristics before all the other jewelers out there, many with more skill in fabrication than me, could get to it. But for now I’ll have to be satisfied with being as creative as I can with what is available to me.
