Artistic insomnia

I’m not the only one lying sleepless at night because ideas keep on manifesting themselves in the overly tired brain. I know. But at 3 AM in the morning, after 4 hours of patchy sleep, the world is a big, dark and quiet place and so thoughts do tend to take up a lot of space and I do feel a bit alone. But… who hasn’t been fighting inner ghosts in the middle of the night?

Luckily, these days I’m mostly awake because my brain refuses to shut down, when it’s just having a juicy new idea to warp, bend and shape. Very good, but I do need sleep and hence I have tried different strategies:

1)       

1. Getting up and drawing the damn thing (over and over) to get it out of my head. It helps, but sometimes it just sparks new ideas and then I’m back to square one
2. Taking a shower. Kind of resets everything. Works quite well too, unless it’s too late in the night/early in the morning – then I’m just even more awake
3. Have my boyfriend “teddy” me (he cuddles me thoroughly, which is very comforting)
4. Earplugs (I’m a very light sleep and wake up at any noise, but I also find them quite uncomfortable)

I am sharing this tendency of insomnia with my aunt Barbara, who is currently visiting me from South Jutland. We both love Art Nouveau and most definitely have the same artistic blood running in our veins. Barbara has for decades been creating the most amazing pieces of decorative artwork, painting large hat boxes, smaller wooden boxes and very pretty oval brooches and I admire her work immensely. I have given her the key to my workshop, enabling her to go there and work when I’m at my other daytime work and she has made herself a very nice corner, working partly at the table and partly on the window seat.

 It’s so cozy to work in the same room as her. Mostly we are quiet, deeply concentrating on our respective work and listening to some quiet classical music. Once in a while we take a break and share our development and other thoughts.

Barbara surely "developes" her work at top speed, now she's in a working frenzy. And what beautiful work! This is how far she got yesterday, being very productive indeed. I’m expecting her to finish up most of these today.

So what will it look like when it’s done? Much more layered and detailed. Here is some of her previous work, including an amazing hat box which she made especially for me. Perhaps we’ll open an Etsy shop selling her pieces. Do you think she would succeed?

I am writing this in the morning. It’s 7:30 AM and both of us have been awake for some time, ideas churning. My aunt is up and about to leave the home to go to the workshop and I’ll meet her there in the afternoon. Oh what bliss to share the passion for creating beauty with someone so close to my heart!

Busy bracelet days

I am so lucky… I am currently having a customer visiting me and my shop all the way from France! Well, she isn’t only here for my jewelry, but still… it sounds kind of cool to say “a customer is coming in from France” while looking important. Never manage that last part – I start chucklin’ also because Melanie, as is her name, is just such a nice person! If I’m really lucky, I get to upgrade her to the status “friend”. Let’s see…

Anyways, Melanie had bought a few of my pieces via Etsy, amongst those an oxidized bracelet form the fairy treasure-collection with a moonstone in a golden bezel.

She then realized, that the bracelet was a tad big for her and convoed me to ask if I could make it smaller for her. Now, it holds a stone and hence I was very hesitant to do just that, so I offered her to make her a new one – then she would also get the chance of having it custom made.

So, Melanie came to my shop, had some tea (and lunch) and sat down in my window seat to draw herself a new bracelet while I worked and we chatted. Very cosy indeed! I showed her a bracelet that I had just finished (it’s for sale on Amio):

Inspired by that, she decided on an open bracelet with curls in each end and a somewhat smaller leaf. It’s not often that I get to work physically with my customer, but this was a very nice experience. Melanie stayed around while I worked on her bracelet, and hence could all the time make new choices when I had to make some – instead of just accepting my choices. To me it was a big relief to have her choose as we went, making sure that she got exactly what she wanted. In the end she decided to only have the leaf (which was somewhat smaller than the original) itself oxidized and exchange the moonstone with an emerald.

And here is the result:

We were both very pleased with the result and I will definitely work a bit more with this design! Luckily Melanie stayed around and will visit me tomorrow too before she’s heading back to France.

I have enjoyed both her visit and working with her immensely and hope to see her again. Business or not – she’s plain pleasant company!

Flush-setting at last!

These days I look a lot at my left pinky. Not that it’s something special, but it holds a small ring that I just created – and in the ring I have flush set two light blue sapphires.

So? You may ask.

Well, this is my first flush-set piece and I’m terribly proud of it! I have been wanting to learn this technique, that I constantly see used very elegantly around me, for ages. Look for instance at some of my favourite designers Vibes amazing rings:

- Impossible to create without mastering flush-setting. To me this is a very professional way of setting stones and hence is something you do, when you are a “real” jeweler. Needles to say, that I felt somewhat inferior being unable to perform that technique.

I actually tried once with a piece of copper and some glass stones and broke both, which didn’t help mending my feeling of inferiority. Since I have been asking quite a few very talented goldsmiths how exactly they do it. The variations in their directions were very small, but in this way I slowly saved up courage and knowledge to give the technique another try.

I have just created a stunning ring made of her own old whitegold rings for a customer with quite a few flush set diamonds. I had to hand it over to a professional setter in order to finish it properly.

It annoyed me not being able to do it myself and when my customer picked up the ring, she asked, before leaving why I didn’t just learn the technique myself?

That was the last straw. I decided, there and then, to give it a go as soon as I was alone in my workshop again. I couldn’t find my practice stones made of glass and decided to jump straight to the real thing and pulled out a cast silver ring which I had previously made and two light blue sapphires of 3 and 2,5mm. I chose those stones partly because I happened to have quite a few of them and partly because sapphires are very hard (second after diamonds), so I figured they would be able to take some abuse.

And here is how I went about it:

I drilled a hole of 2 mm where I wanted the first stone. This part is debatable. The usual reason to do so is, that it will let more light in. Actually I think this is bullsh*. If you wear a ring, no light can penetrate from below – at all. I have seen plenty of flush set stones with no holes drilled through. However, I chose to do it here, because it seemed to me to be the easiest solution for a beginner and because it made it possible to check if it actually stuck (by pushing in a needle from behind).

Then I took a round burr which was a fraction smaller than the diameter of the stone = 2,8 mm and drilled until JUST a bit over half down. This is the critical part. Drill too deep and you end up with a well where it’s impossible to push enough material down. Drill too shallow and you won’t be able to collect enough material to form the edge. Practice is the name of the game I assume – and going slowly. As mentioned before: You might as well go straight to the ball burr-part, so you only switch burr once.
Then I switched to the setting burr – the one that looks like a house from the side and which creates a good edge for the stone to rest on. Choose one of the exact same size or a fraction bigger – no more! Now I had a hole that was ideally fitted for the stone. Well, obviously I ended up swapping burrs around a lot, because I went slowly and carefully and had to adjust and take out more silver than I had initially done, but I ended up learning how to achieve the right depth.

In went the stone. What you are looking for is that the “table” – the flat top of the facet-cut stone – is absolutely flush with the surface you are attempting to set in. Hence the name of the technique.

I then chose to work a bit like when you are bezel setting: With my point burnisher (it looks like a short awl or pricker, just with a bit more rounded point) I pressed in the edge north, south, east and west to roughly secure the stone before starting to follow the edge around, slowly pushing it down upon the stone. In the end I just went round and round, tilting the burnisher more and more vertical as I went.

And all of a sudden, it was done. The stone didn’t move any more. I tried to hit it loose - it didn’t come loose. I pricked through from the backside with a needle (though not full force) and it stayed. I had flush set my first stone! Okay... the surface had taken quite a bit of abuse, how fortunate that I had gone for a design with a coarse surface, but still... stone was stuck and that was the main thing!

Immediately I went for the 2,5 mm stone and repeated the process with the same good result.

Surprised and happy I sat back and admired my work, awed by the fact that I had finally done it and even succeeded in my first attempt!

All of a sudden I feel like a ”grown up” jeweler and a whole new range of designs opened up to me. A big design-limitation has been removed. Yesyes, I will have to practice some more etc., but the ice is broken and the way to tiny glittering diamonds flush set in my designs is paved. Hooray! I am looking forward to sharing those designs with you in future.

(There are many more instructions on flush setting on the internet. If you would like another one, check out the one from Ganoksin: http://www.ganoksin.com/borisat/nenam/gypsy-setting.htm )

A last comment on the hole-drilling-issue:
I was so enthusiastic about my new ability that I decided to throw myself into creating a new version with more, but smaller stones - this time without the holes behind the stones. Again I went for sapphires, but various shades of pinks. Here is the result together with the first try:

And solo:

I think it came out quite nice and when reconsidering the hole-or-no-hole-issue, I took a closer look at the first ring. Turns out that I can see the colour of my skin shining through the biggest of the blue stones when I'm wearing the ring, which isn't necessarily a good thing. I don't think I'll drill through again, or if I do, use a very small drill, but what do you say? Hole or no hole?

A childs design

”Aunt Karin” is one of my titles, earned by the children of my brother. And aunt Karin received last year a small drawing from her niece Marie. She was four and a half and had drawn the most amazing little ornament. Jewelry nerd as I am, I of cause immediately saw a pretty piece and took it home with me.

There it was – in a drawer, and waited. Actually, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it: I wanted to create a piece, inspired by Maries drawing, for her mother’s birthday in may. But may came and went and I was busy setting up my studio-shop and so I was a bad sister-in-law and did not give her a birthday present. Because I was stubborn: I WANTED to give her a piece inspired by her own daughter. And so, one year after Marie made her brilliant little creation, I finally took my time to create a 3D version in silver.

And here we are: the doodle and its silvery sister

Initially I wanted to just be inspired by Maries drawing and make a symmetric piece, perhaps with inlaid ivory or cast colored plastic, but eventually I decided to copy her design as faithfully as I could, keeping the crooked lines. They are cute me thinks and capture Maries skills at a particular point in time.

I am pretty satisfied. The attached beads were the closest I could get to Maries design with the materials I had at hand. I would have liked something slightly more sturdy, but they still do the trick I’d say. 

The overall appearance works like a charm – and I am happy to tell, that the mother was quite thrilled to receive this little unique piece of jewelry –a co-production by her daughter and sister in law. Awwwwwww :-)

Inspiring Berlin

It’s summer and vacation is the name of the game. Not much business and most are travelling somewhere. As did I – to Berlin. I go there every summer and don’t stop to find this huge city, brimming with history, fascinating. The city holds a peculiar mixture of splendid grandeur from the time when it was one of the wealthiest in the western world, to now when it “poor but sexy” as a former mayor once stated. Obviously it’s still very affected by the fact that it for decades was divided and all citizens suffered from their situation – one way or another. Its 20 years since the wall fell, but the Berliners are still displaying the very “berlinerisch” way of life: the principle of the necessity of the available needles as we call it in Danish. In other words: Work with what you have to work with and make the best of it. And so they do!

One of the best examples are the gardens and makeshift dwellings which are found it the pockets of no-mans-land. Often where the wall used to be, but in general where buildings have been teared down and left a piece of land which is currently not being used for anything. At the Moritzplatz we stumbled over a garden, a so-called potagére, where you grow mainly crops, but also adorn with flowers. Everything was makeshift and so the vegetables were grown by a community of nearby Berliners in bags, old plastic baskets and zinc buckets.

The crop was eventually turned into delicious vegetarian meals and sold in the café on the plot.

A strange mixture of trashy trailer park and real natural beauty and zest of life it was!

Many buildings have balconies and the Berliners for sure know how to use those too!

When not decorating with flowers, some turn to paint. Yes, of cause you’ll see a lot of graffiti. Line in any other city, but some go about it in a much more deliberate and artistic way. The posh version of graffiti is street art – often in the shape of pictures glued to the wall, such as this comment to commercialism:

The text says “do I actually need all this shit?”

Others agree to paint their entire house:

Of cause I fell in love with this one. It had curls for one, secondly a few small surprises such as birds somewhat apart from the mural itself and last, but not least, humor!

In olden times, the decorations were a tad sturdier. Here’s a dragon and of cause I loved it!

Now humor and Germans usually isn’t something we jump to make the connection between, but make no mistake, there are many smiles and silly pranks, especially in Berlin! At a wonderful flea market at the Maybachufer in Kreutzberg we came upon a peculiar jazz band with a very funny female singer and a clown.

 The singer was dressed somewhere between a 50’s woman expected to dance rock’n roll and a cute little girl. When se wasn’t playing accordion or trumpet, she used a small megaphone as a microphone.

Not only did this amplify her voice, it also distorted it in a way, making it all sound as if it was played on one of those old fashioned record players with a big horn. What an ambience!

At the same flea market I came across these lovely vests. Unfortunately, yours truly is a tad too… erhm… round to fit into these, but that won’t keep me from admiring the embroidery and the cut!

At some point we felt the need for a bit of peace and quiet – a hard thing to come by in a large city, but a sure bet are usually the cemeteries. Here we have found the large Jewish one in Prenzlauer Berg. Not surprisingly, it has been bombed and vandalized and has been left largely undisturbed since WW2.

That shows and I must admit, I love the pleasant decay that is the result of the forced neglect. A place truly out of this world…

Back into the real world, we started doubting the reality of it when we encountered this merry bunch of musicians entertaining Berliners and tourists alike. Those people seemed as if they had walked straight from a fantasy novel or video game. Especially the dark haired gentleman was pulling my attention. And yes ladies, you DO see the cheeks through his “garments”.

One of the last days my boyfriend and I decided to split, enabling each of us to pursue our own interests without boring the other to death. I went first to the local tools- and stone dealers (of cause) and used 150€ on a wonderful Vallorbe file, a few other knickknacks and a lot of amazing and large drops of prehenite, onyx, rose quartz and pearls. I have never seen such a large selection of top drilled drops! I was in heaven, apart from not bringing money enough. Oh well…

Afterwards I went to the national museum of art and thoroughly enjoyed all the grand masters, plus quite a few who deserve that title and don’t hold it. I didn’t bring my camera, but in any case: I was looking for inspiration and surely got some! Guess I’ll be doing a few diorama-inspired pieces.

And this one? Well, I just liked the intense and seductive stare of her *grin*

Berlin is great and I’m here as often as possible, but one thing is less great: distances are a lot bigger than tiny 1,5 million Copenhagen. The result: Sorely sore feet. Oh well, I happily pay the price :-)

Drawing in the countryside

I just came home from a few days of vacation on the lovely island Fur in the northern part of Denmark. Danish countryside means agriculture and a few forests plus a lot of coastline and beaches. It’s an old country and hence many buildings are rather old too. – A lovely feature when you want to relax a bit by drawing.

We had set out, the entire family (myself, my 6 year old daughter and my parents) to find a good spot for drawing and ended up at an old farm. It’s a traditional square with a yard covered by cobbled stones and a large tree in the middle (a “protection tree”). Originally it was constructed in 1600-and-something, which shows by the wooden structure of the gate – later the roof of this part was covered with sheet metal unlike the main living part which is thatched like our summerhouse:

Okay, back to the farm. Grandfather, mother and daughter sat down and started drawing the same motif – the gate leading into the farm. The result was quite stunning. We were sitting a bit apart, and so the angel to the motif was slightly different, but it’s quite clear that we drew (or in my father case: painted) the same motif. Each of us chose different features to bring into the picture. Johanne of cause drew the swing and the weather vane, while I was concentrating on the inner woodwork of the gate. My father painted the building in its surroundings.

This is the first time that we had Johanne out on one of our traditional vacation-drawing trips and she loved it, working very concentrated. Not the last time I take her, she has a real talent to be nurtured!

To me it was just nice to draw something else than jewelry for a change and I think necessary in order to keep your drawing skills intact. Maybe I should draw a few more humans again – perhaps even coquis? It’s been a few years and that is one of the best drawing exercises available!

Devilish wrapping rings turning heavenly beautiful

Two customers came to me. They were friends and had been to Sri Lanka together. There, they had bought a number of beautiful faceted stones and now they wanted them set in each their wrapping ring. One had seven stones and wanted them set in a wrapping ring made of 14 carat gold, the other had five stones and a redundant wedding ring of 14 carat gold that she wanted incorporated, but the rest made of silver.

We had a long chat and made a number of drawings. They wanted wrapping rings, but not identical rings and actually had each their style. The one with the seven stones wanted a curved design, possibly with some balls too, while the one with the five stones wanted a more minimalistic and simple design.

Very well – I started working. It took quite a while to create all those settings – most of them were slightly irregular, and so nothing premade could be used at all. Then I removed the writing from the inside of the wedding ring, cut it open and milled it a bit thinner before closing it to a ring again – now absolutely plain and simple.

Creating a wrapping ring is principally very simple. You take a length of wire (I find 1,3 mm the best gauge), wrap it around a ring mandrel where you know it would fit, and solder it all together. However, it’s of cause not that simple. Thing is, it has to be wrapped in a way, that leaves no crossings of the wire at the sides of the ring, which would be very annoying when worn. And then of cause you need to wrap it in a way that can accommodate all the settings you are planning for. The more stones, the more complicated. Needless to say, that the one with the seven stones presented quite a challenge! 14 carat gold is also not that easy to work with. Yes, pure gold is very soft, but 14 carat gold is half copper/silver and other metals, which makes the alloy a lot harder to work than sterling silver. A lot of swearing words were heard in my studio while manipulating (and annealing) the wire until I was satisfied.

Then I asked my customers in for a fitting. Not only was it important to find out if the ring actually fit. If you create a wide wrapping ring, it very much depends on how the finger is created. Me, I have what appears as moderately slender fingers, but they are rather fleshy at the base. That means that a wide band very quickly feels too small, even though it has the “right” size. My customers however, did not have that issue, and so the rings fit – phew! Then we started playing around with the settings. I had of cause a suggestion, but we ended moving the stones around quite a lot before we were all satisfied. I took pictures to remember for my further work:

Actually, I ended up changing the settings of the golden ring once again, but that is how it is – when you work with it, you often find out that another solution is the better one. Luckily my customer and I agreed on a new version.

Assembling the silver/gold ring version was fairly easy. With “only” five settings we were on friendly terms.

The big golden ring with the seven settings however, was a stubborn lady and I soldered, re-soldered and then again eight times before I was satisfied, all the settings and all the balls were in place. Setting the stones of cause also was a challenge, due to the hard-alloy-issue, but I propped the ring on my mandrel, fixated it in the vice and used a punch and hammer to tap the settings over the stones.

Once I was done renovating and polishing I leaned back and looked at them. I might have been very annoyed at a point or two in that process, but I must say… the result was absolutely stunning! The silver/gold version was elegant, colorful and absolutely perfect for my customer. The golden was sumptuous like an Indian Bollywood movie, very feminine and alive with all the balls carefully placed to balance the stones in order to create a overall harmonic design. “Wow” I though “just… wow!” -and ended the day being rather proud of my work.