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.

New toys!

I’m currently stocking up on a lot of tools that I have been missing for a while. The list is long and I buy them as I get the money, but this morning I had a shipment from the UK. Mmmmm.... the smell of a fresh tool shipment in the morning...

 Inside was a collection of tools that I had long needed: Long tweezers (so nice not to burn your fingertips when you work with tweers while soldering), a tiny hammer (to harden open jump rings after montage), tools for wax carving (I have the wax and the ideas now I just need the time...) a new burnisher (where did my old one go?!) and most importantly: bezel mandrels in a number of different shapes.

Granted, I’m not sure how to exactly work with some of them – especially the star shaped one eludes me. Any ideas? However, I got them a lot cheaper than if I should have bought them here in Denmark (alle nine for the price of 2 bough at my local vendor) and hence rush to recommend the eBay shop: Jewellers-Tools

Now off to the workshop where I’m working on a number of projects with flowers. Here is a teaser ;-)

A room of ones own

So I got myself a new studio - a bare and hampered room to be changed into something completely else. Given the fact that I have worked in a number of different places, but never really able to make it MY space, I was yearning for a room, that would be the essence of me. -My cave where my inspiration could flow freely and undisturbed, build itself up to the crescendo of new designs and new beauty. Therefore, the aesthetics of the room that was to be my new studio/shop was very important to me.

I chose to create a calm canvas of white and green, adding wood, black and gold to the cocktail. The result is quite stunning if I may say so myself. I have been working hard for one month, dedicating literally every wake hour to this project.  My home looks like a wasteland, I have no more visible horizontal surfaces there, the laundry basked hasn’t been able to be closed for weeks and my kid hasn’t had the most nutritious and well-prepared meals etc. But I have made a year-long dream come true: I have my own studio shop!

I went from this:

To this:

Now it’s finally time to create all the long-time-due custom orders (sorry and thank you for being so patient!) and turn all those ideas that have been massing in my mind and sketch books into reality. Oh bliss!

Envy my anvil!

My grandfather was a blacksmith. I remember seeing him in his workshop, shaping red glowing iron on his anvil. Ding, ding, ding, dingdididing it said, as he hammered away. The “dingdididing” was the “cool off” blow he did on the anvil itself after 3 strokes on the item to be shaped. It had a very peculiar, forceful, yet almost meditative rhythm to it.

15 years ago my grandfather died and my parents couldn’t bear to part with this strong symbol of him, so they stored the anvil in their moist garage where it waited for better times while getting more and more rusty. Then a few months ago I realized, that I could really use and anvil and started searching for one online – until it struck me: Grandfathers anvil! Wonder if it’s still in my parents’ garage? It was. However, obviously iron and moisture aren’t the best of friends, and so it looked like this:

A closer look confirmed the ridiculous weight of it: 103,5 kilos!

I needed the anvil for my work, and so of cause needed a good surface to work on, so I had to start grinding. I’m okay with the rust – it tells a story, is the patina of this old tool, but I needed to create a workable surface. Hence I decided to grind away the rust entirely from the tip of the horn and a corner of the horizontal working area, lightly polish the rest of said working area and leave the rest of the anvil as I found it. It took two hours, a fairly sore back and humming nerve ends in my hands to just achieve that goal. I shudder to think of how much time it would have consumed to clean out the entire anvil!

And then it moved in – 103,5 kilos worth of anvil plus roughly half the weight for the old stub it rests on. It has most of its dents, caused by my Grandfathers blows, still visible and it’s shiny and new in some parts – ready to receive my own blows and dents and so mix his and my passion for shaping metal.

Thank you Grandfather. I will cherish your tool and use it to the best of my abilities!