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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 08:17 pm (UTC)Beeswax, unfortunately, is a bit soft for most jewelry wax purposes. It can be used to lubricate saw blades and burs; and sometimes (when it's warm enough) for picking up wee tiny stones and the like. We're not going to have a lot of wax this year, anyway; we'll have more when the comb in the hives starts getting funky and we recycle it. Besides, I ADORE beeswax candles. So that'll be tempting!
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Date: 2007-10-08 08:33 pm (UTC)At least it's not going to waste!
But it would have been cool if you could have used the beeswax. You even could have written off the costs of the hive maintenance as a business expense too! ;)