Arm

                                                     Sometime ago I made two nametags.

 I think the father was quite happy with them. He and his wife told me so.

I've had quite a break with the writing. I have not been up to it at all.

 These are all very small hinges. I think you can call them that. It's a technique I've been told to learn.

They're really small and annoying.

 And here are some silver plates. I sawed them out from a ring like thing I made.

I later read that you should mark them up. So that you know the order of their placement.

 I applied the tiny hinges to the plates, this was not done without curses.

But it looked quite neat when it was done.

 

 This is a part of a lock, clasp or latch? It's small and was fidgety to do.

 

And this is what it all turned out to be finally. It became quite nice!

Little men

One of them fell out of my ear. He was made of paper, had long legs and a diminutive head. He placed himself in the scrap silver bowl, where he fell asleep after covering himself in flakes of silver.

I guess a bed made of copper is desirable after his journey. After all, he made it out of my ear.
Later on he made it clear that wherever he'd been before he hadn't been lazy, he had a plan. And friends.

These little imps never move an inch while you're looking. And then when you looked away I guess they darted away. They remind me of those little games Army men or something.

They abandonded their comrade and ganged up with the swedish king (Not the current one though).
I wonder who made the commands, and I let their little mission go on without disturbing.

Suddenly I felt that something was wrong. I tilted my head to the right and realised that I was being o so slowly ambushed by these two fellas. Their talking with the king was probably just a distraction to keep me calm. I captured them, look at them kicking at each other. Blaming each other.

I planned on soldering small coils on their feet. My teacher said that it was a waste of their little feet. And the fact that I didn't want to cripple them. My second plan was to make little holes in their feet... I could almost hear them scream while I spoke to myself.

So I put them in oxide and tied them up instead. The edges of the charactes are polished as to make a contrast to the black. I'm rather content with the work. I don't know if I will hear from them again. The paper guy is still hanging around in the scrap bowl, I wonder if he's waiting for his underlings.

Bell

I made a bell. Me and my teacher skipped the part about the particular sound. As that turned out to be a single branch of musical theory and practice, campanology will have to wait. This was before I started to snap pictures as well.

So we can imagine we are traveling back in time when we look at this, traveling in time while we're focusing on me NOT taking pictures of everything. I did however, as I usually do when I decide to publish something here snap a picture of the final work. I tend to wrap myself up in my own sentences. It can get quite messy.

I started with a copper plate and made a rough model, to get familiar with the hammer and the idea of shaping silver with it. After soldering it into a cone I started to hammer. I think that bells are usually molded, but I'll save that for some other time.
It was really funny, you get to unleash a little emotion, other than patience that is.

 It surprised me at first. I do not know wich tone it emitted when I rang it. But it was clean and rather loud for such a small thing. I was later informed that noble metals have a tendency to working rather well in instruments. As soon as I find the cord to my scanner I will upload some sketches.

About ideas

This one did not last long. I tried to make a ring that looked as uneven and bent as possible. However I noticed when I was soldering it that it was too uneven to look good. It was more like a mishap than something roughly done. And that wasn't quite the idea I had in mind. So I had to even it out almost before I had a chance to finish my idea. I do want to publish some pictures of a failure as well.

Because there will be alot of failures, but this idea took place before I started snapping pictures of my work.Or rather during the time I realised that I should start snapping pictures of work in progress. And because of that there is no picture of the mishap ring. There is however a picture of the ring after I worked it out.

This is the wrong picture. It shows another piece, or rather several pieces that I'm currently working with. It is quite a tedious assignment, but really nice effects of it. A lot of small parts coming together. Well, enough of that, see the thing out of focus?

It's a snake, and it's resting inside the mishap ring that evened out. How it got there is still unknown to me. There are ALOT of stuff on my desk, and I can't really keep track of anything, everyday is a surprise. This little thing was a little thread of silver that didn't really come to life, rather took shape and place within the ring.

After hammering, filing and putting oxide on it. And then filing it again it turned out like this. So rather than the ring itself being uneven and rough, I worked with the surface. The red stone inside it is a crystal of rhodocrosite. It's my latest investment, it's rather fragile and I haven't the slightest idea of what to make of it. You will probably see more of it as I get ideas.

Geometry

I was trying to create a slight disturbance in a piece I did quite recently. The idea was to make something that caught the eye, not because of colours, but of the shape alone (or rather a disturbance in geometric shapes). I realise now while writing that this was quite a strange idea given the material. Perhaps not because of the material itself, rather this line of work.

Where glossy surfaces and seamless designs seem to be the most commonly sought. That of course being my idea of a boring approach, and some way of me justifying my work right now.

I started with two nice squares. While I had the pieces in my hand I tried to shift them over each other to see wich position I liked the most.
After a while I decided that the two squares were just a bit too square.

You can see in the picture that I decided that the two shapes should interfere with each other rather than just being there along with each other. I decided that one square should win and eat a piece of the other square. I did not put it that way there and then, but at the time of writing I just can't stop myself.
That not being horrible enough I made them live next to each other.

I do not know wich one suffers the most, the one that was eaten or the one who did the eating. Also, I did not assemble them exactly nice, at the time I was quite fed up with the geometric shapes and wanted to work with different surfaces and soldering. So I kept going, abandonding the idea of exact geometry and working more on the disturbances of shapes.

I made it glossy and in my opinion nice looking anyway. So the original idea was somehow lost in the making. It became something else. I often like those ideas that take their own shape and evolve to something else. But sometimes I wonder if it's a mistake to work some ideas through. I thought of this and decided that it would be another idea to highlight some parts that perhaps could be seen as mistakes.

Yes, the highlights are close to black.

Links

This chain has been completed for a while.
You don't put the links together as you do them as I first tought somehow. I forged them first, soldered them together and then sawed them open to assemble them again. It was a thorough crash-course in soldering, and that was quite fun. When I do the next one I do want some other piece of work to alter with tho.

I didn't snap any pictures of it while it was in progress. So just the finished clanking chain. I put oxide on the inside and hammered the outer surface to give it a little life.

It was 32 links altogether and the clasp as a seperate one. I think it's roughly 70 cm in length.
The next chain will have much smaller links if it's up to me to decide.

A new hobby

Or something like that.
I've started smithing. It's quite fun, and it feels like something I wanna keep up.

I'm going to publish some pictures and work in progress here. My first works are two brooches. 

First try at a figurative brooch, it's copperplate on top of a piece of steel. I liked the cave-manish look of it and decided to make it rather rough and unpolished overall.

Another one, this one is made from a sketch I made, inspired by a hand. It was supposed to be a flat plate of silver. But it decided against that and changed to this form. I couldn't fight the idea.

And then I decided to put a stone in it. I made the socket and was then about to polish it. I was given a polisher that reminded me of a pencil. And then decided to draw on it instead of making it glossy. Turned out pretty nice.

And here is the finished one. I made the edges darker with oxide. And then added some sprinkles of silver in the dark with a file?

This will be a blog for me to keep track of my own progress as well as inspirational links and thoughts of smithing. Feel free to comment!