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Oct. 7th, 2007 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
afmetalsmithToday I got my mysterious hardware item fully polished and ready to be sent out for casting. Yay, me! It's looking pretty damn good, too, if I do say so myself- and I did some Google searches, and it looks at the moment like I don't have much serious competition for my concept. :)
Also, my studio is delightfully scented with beeswax and honey, due to our beekeeping efforts (detailed in our Beemused blog). This makes a nice change from the swamp-gas aroma of liver-of-sulfur, for instance.
I also did some pricing work on the argentium Confetti Ring I recently finished. Ouch. I spend a lot more time on these things than I'd recognized. This is one way my pricing software is a help; it makes it harder for me to ignore aspects of a piece, be they labor or materials.
Also: while I am not proud to admit this, I often find pictures of other people's work encouraging. This morning, for instance, I saw a really lovely piece with 22k granulation on it- and when i examined it more closely, I saw that in one area the granules had been really fried. I mean- fried to the point where I may well have junked the piece! and yet the artist was proud enough of it despite that to feature it, and in initial viewing the fried part was not all that obvious. I often feel similarly when I see flawed stone-setting featured in pictures. The thing is- I'm a very harsh critic of my own work, and feel like I've failed when I mess up. And yet- many successful, famous artisans aren't all that much better than I am, and apparently feel no qualms about featuring work that I'd feel ashamed of! So! I do find it encouraging, since it seems that my own skills are pretty solid; plus, I begin to recognize that my own critiques- while valid- are harsher than they need to be, and people do not necessarily require pure perfection as a matter of course. A piece can be gorgeous without being perfect. Something for me to think on (though I do want to make perfect stuff!).
Also, my studio is delightfully scented with beeswax and honey, due to our beekeeping efforts (detailed in our Beemused blog). This makes a nice change from the swamp-gas aroma of liver-of-sulfur, for instance.
I also did some pricing work on the argentium Confetti Ring I recently finished. Ouch. I spend a lot more time on these things than I'd recognized. This is one way my pricing software is a help; it makes it harder for me to ignore aspects of a piece, be they labor or materials.
Also: while I am not proud to admit this, I often find pictures of other people's work encouraging. This morning, for instance, I saw a really lovely piece with 22k granulation on it- and when i examined it more closely, I saw that in one area the granules had been really fried. I mean- fried to the point where I may well have junked the piece! and yet the artist was proud enough of it despite that to feature it, and in initial viewing the fried part was not all that obvious. I often feel similarly when I see flawed stone-setting featured in pictures. The thing is- I'm a very harsh critic of my own work, and feel like I've failed when I mess up. And yet- many successful, famous artisans aren't all that much better than I am, and apparently feel no qualms about featuring work that I'd feel ashamed of! So! I do find it encouraging, since it seems that my own skills are pretty solid; plus, I begin to recognize that my own critiques- while valid- are harsher than they need to be, and people do not necessarily require pure perfection as a matter of course. A piece can be gorgeous without being perfect. Something for me to think on (though I do want to make perfect stuff!).
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Date: 2007-10-08 01:46 pm (UTC)Glad to see the hives are doing well. My friends also got their first honey from their hive a couple of weeks ago and raved about it when I went to visit them last weekend. Needless to say, there was none left! :-P
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Date: 2007-10-08 08:11 pm (UTC)We, of course, look at stuff up close and with magnification- and when I don't, that's still how it looks when photographed! Flaws are VERY visible in the full-sized, roughly 2500-pixel-wide pictures. And I go Eep. But that's not how it looks worn- nor even in most pictures in use!
J and I have each tried a finger's worth of our honey, but not more than that- just some of the stuff that's dripped out of the combs. We'll have more to try once we get boxes- we're going to package up some as cut comb in the boxes, and the cutting will release a bunch. And then we can also look at extracting some for mead, etc. Yum. But our girls did us proud!