Halloween in Fanta Se

Although Santa Fe is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful cities in the US, it certainly has its dark side.  All those posh adobe hotels and expensive galleries downtown are a pretty veneer on a very, very old and very strange place.  I love Halloween and my city definitely has some of the scariest places to visit that I have ever seen.  More often than not, buildings in Santa Fe have ghosts or at least ghost stories.  The house next door has reports of a man who walks up and down the parking lot at 4 or 5 in the morning.  To beat them all is the old prison on Route 14 (the Turquoise Trail).  After a riot in the '80s, the prison has remained empty of living prisoners- spooky!  Visit if you're feeling brave...

Mystery Alloy

Here are a few new cloisonnes in progress- fine silver laminated with copper using eutectic solder. Notice the dark spots on the large piece: the solder has eaten through the silver to form nice little craters! The eutectic solder must've formed some strange alloy when it melted between the two layers of pure metal. I'll still enamel the piece just to see what might happen...

Nambe Lake

Photos from my beautiful Labor Day excursion 3 miles up Winsor trail in the Santa Fe ski basin.

Die-pressed shapes

I just returned from Jim Cohen's studio where I got to press these exciting shapes from a masonite die. I can them stick them in the pitch bowl for further shaping, or enamel them.

New camera fun...

Better pictures, hopefully. Working with the new camera sure makes things easier! I'm having much less trouble with glare on the enamels and the zoom capacity is amazing. These pictures have not even been cropped or modified in any way!

Slowly working on enameling 3D objects. Here are a few copper beads in process; the first pic shows the beads with base coats of enamel and silver foil, the next shows cloisonne circles attached to the beads with lily root glue. The glue is amazingly easy to use- the wires stick almost immediately and you can manipulate the form without the wires falling off or even moving.

Chinese Underground house

Images of my new house in the old chinese medicine compound. You can see part of my garden with zucchini and tomato plants and a rainbow in the background.

Silver spoons....

I'm working on forging spoons from ingots cast in Delft clay. I started out with a lollipop-shaped form cut from a paint stirring stick. After an impression is made in the clay, I poured in about 1.3 oz of sterling silver. The rough ingot is then hammered on an anvil until the thickness is reduced to about 16 ga on the handle and 20 ga for the spoon bowl. The pictures show a raw ingot, an ingot that has been hammered and a finished spoon.

Trying to improve my photos...

I'm working on my photos so that I can submit them to AJM, but it turns out that my camera has too low a pixel rate! 1 megapixel just doesn't cut it anymore!

Raised copper form

A weird raised form in 18 gauge copper.

New cloisonnes

A few more cloisonnes - ninomiya enamels on fine silver.

Pitch bowl

Here's the new pitch bowl being set up for work. My first project isn't the best, but I got the process down...

Makeshift graver and stonesetting setup

Here's how I'm using my swivel vise to work as an engraver's block. The vise is also great for holding a dop stick for stonesetting.

New cloisonne enamels

Beginning Enamels

A few images of initial work in enamels: the moth image was made with sifted layers under watercolor enamels and china paint; the round pendant is sugar-fired transparent over stenciled blus transparent and watercolor enamel; the little sugar-fired gumdrops are going to be set like stones, but I haven't gotten to that yet. I started cloisonne on Friday and have already made one complete disaster and am working on yet another, which is coming along much better.... I'll hopefully have some nice images of that soon.

Studio at Penland

Here's a pic of my metals studio spot- we've got a great view and lots of tools...

the kilns are in the larger back room and look out over the Metals garden. This is nice, because we spend a lot of time standing around the kilns!

Penland pics

Here are a few images from Penland- my metals studio is the white upper level building to the far right. It is incredible so far- lots of cool people, good food and beautiful scenery... even the weather is perfect: sunny with a few clouds, yet cool and not to humid. I had to work today cleaning- I'll get assigned my workstudy job tonight!

rainbow pics

A few images from the rainbow gathering 2009- we actually got a double rainbow! It was a little too rainy, though... my tent is still drying out!

more copper jewelry....