Silver Linings

It's been a bit crazy these past couple of weeks.  I've had quite a few visitors and have been juggling school while feeling the need to entertain my guests as well.  Okay, truthfully entertaining my guests was more of an excuse to avoid my school work but now I am paying the price.  The good news is, I work well under pressure and have completely immersed myself in my studies (the two days before I started my pre-birthday and birthday and post-birthday binging).  The other good news is that I finally completed the hollow ring!  The last few phases included filling the holes with resin, filing and polishing.  

Using resin is literally like watching paint dry. 

The finished piece

It's pretty cool to see the colors with the sun shining through it.  Oh la la!

Even better news is we have moved on to silver!  This project is a set of earrings with a stone setting.  We started off with a small strip and have progressed quite quickly already. 

Silver prepped to make spheres

After I cut the pieces, I annealed them so that I could hammer them into half spheres.

After much hammering and filing, we end up with perfectly sized spheres. 

Once the spheres were soldered together, I filed them to make the surface smooth.  We chose two small stones and created a setting for them with the remaining silver left over from the spheres.

This week, we will create a piece to connect the balls and stone setting so more to come on this project. 

In the meantime and in between time, I am spending time sketching.  This has proven to be more challenging than making jewelry.  I used to think I was a decent artist but now I am having second thoughts about this. 

Square in Lucca, Tuscany

My sketch.  You be the judge

Maybe it's not so bad; I'm hopeful it will get better in time. 
That's all I have for now.  I'll post something else soon.  Ciao!

Rings and Things

Ciao a tutti!  I am now finishing my third week of school, yet oddly it feels like it's been more like three months.  It seems as though time is moving quite faster than normal.  I guess a good measure would be the amount of work I have accomplished, which doesn't seem like much but the learning curve is high so perfection will take time.  Here is what I've done thus far--

My first project was an assignment on right angles, sawing straight lines and drilling.  We were all given a piece of brass to cut, anneal (process of heating metal to make it more workable), hammer and file into a square.  Then we had to drill small holes into the metal and saw straight lines from one end to the other.  It's not so complicated, it just take a lot of patience and accuracy. 

The next assignment was to make a ring.  Fairly simple, and since my first piece was a ring I thought is would be more like a refresher for me but turns out I didn't remember much of anything.  Here is a photo of the first and second assignments after completion.

First and Second Assignments

Now I am into my 3rd assignment.  It's starting to get a bit more complicated.  We are creating a hollow ring.  This one should be interesting, as there are many components to it.  I'm still in the process of making it, but here of some photos of the progress I've made thus far.

This will be a hollow ring.  Lots of components to this one.

Hard at work

This should be completed soon.  I'll post photos of the end result next time.  Now, I will leave you with a couple of random shots of Florence in the fall. 

The Storekeeper

Lady walking dog

Street Walkers

Buona giornata!