Newyorkamera.com

I have had a couple of difficult days trying to put some video into the blog. It just does not work. It should be as easy as it is to put still photos into the text. I have resorted to making Html pages which will open in a new window and I’ll just put the links here in the text. Another annoying thing is that I have put up videos that are 640 pixels wide, the browsers insist on displaying them as 320 wide, half the size. I can open a test window on my computer and the images are the correct size, once they’re on line they display half size. I haven’t been able to find out why. Here’s the link to Henry’s movies. Hope you find them entertaining.

It’s a lazy drizzly Sunday and I am finally taking some time to write. 

On the 18th I had another birthday,  this one ends in a zero and marks the beginning of another decade.  The day was spent in the city doing normal things which means I was on 47th street and in class. I visited Ellen in her studio where the girls all sang happy birthday,  we ate lunch together and had some special cupcakes. It was a really nice event since I hadn’t planned on doing anything special until the weekend. 

 After lunch, I went to class at FIT  where I am working on three pieces in an attempt to get control of raising metal into the shapes and sizes that I want, not just the things that the hammer is delivering.  After each round I am making four measurements to gauge progress and make corrections if things get out of line.  The little cup I had been working on was raising fairly well but I hadn’t noticed that the base diameter shrank about 10 mm. Gennady showed me how to regain the base diameter in class.  it was because of that shrinkage that I added measuring the base to the list of obvious measurements of height, top diameter  and lip to lip around the base. 

 Here’s what the pieces looked like last week after class. Bottoms and tops. The small cup is the piece that had its base re widened. 

 I spent some time over the next weekend raising them (and measuring), then took them to class where, for some reason, I was only able to get one round in on each piece, the usual work in class allows me to raise at least two and a half rounds on each piece. Here they are after class.

I recall now that I was getting some instruction on the small cup, which had reached the right size, but I wanted to see if I could thin the metal a little and give it some more height without changing the top diameter. This action requires a different hammer, the first rounds didn’t do anything noticeable so I asked for help. Each of these pieces started out as a 5, 6, and 7 inch diameter circle of 18 gauge copper.  I’ll work on these again tomorrow. The tall one needs to be narrowed more, the smaller cups need only to be refined before I can begin to chase designs into them.

On the 19th Colman and I went into the city to go th the Met. We were to see the Morandi  and Turner Shows and I wanted to look more closely at the ancient silver and jewelry. It was a beautiful day and we walked up Madison Avenue to take in some of the sights we haven’t seen for a while.  In front of the Whitney there was a street  vendor who was selling african artifacts, among them, on a very crowded table,  were these two bronze leopards, one seated, one standing. I wanted to take both of them home with me. 

We had lunch at Nectar and then went into the Met. No photography was allowed in the major visiting shows so there are no pictures of the Turner or the Morandi paintings.  Colman liked this painting of the Annuciation. 

I found this girdle interesting. It’s very close to a project I’m working on in the studio. 

 And these hair pins are something I’ve ben thinking about but haven’t moved on because I don’t see many in use. 

But here’re the things that I needed to see.  The  ship has really bold chasing and repoussè on its hull, the 16th century tankard has flat chasing on its sides, I intend for my work to be more like it’s top.

After the Met we walked over to Dean and Deluca’s on Madison Avenue to pick up something for dinner.  While we were there I noticed these wrapped pieces of stone which turned out to be salt.  Reading the little card explained that these “plates” were to be used to cook fish on, to serve sushi on, and could be used to  keep food warm on the table if they were first put into a hot oven to charge them. They’re attractive, heavy and more pink than my photo shows, I don’t know if they are fragile or if they salt the food served on them. There were jars of crushed pink salt on the plates, presumably for seasoning. 

At home over the weekend, where it is definitely becoming Fall, the begonias are blooming. This one has enormous flowers.  It’s got a name like Big Roy or Big Bob, I can’t remember what it’s called.

Soon the plants will start to come inside for the winter, I’m not looking forward to that. The studio space has been redesigned and there is less room for the big guys that usually spend the winter there.

Henry is in his second week with us. Every day he grows in ability. Yesterday he discovered jumping, we have graduated from dragging toys to flying toys. He’s also discovered he can get onto my cushion by himself. 

Spent part of the weekend getting a bracelet made. I finished it today by setting the stones. Have been trying to finish other projects including painting papers for New York Central. Have already delivered over twenty sheets and there’s still a number of colors to paint through before I complete the beginning inventory. 

Gennady helped me regain the diameter of the base of my copper test piece. I also started two more, if all goes well tomorrow, I will try and get a round or two of raising done after I paint papers. 

I have finished 5 new bracelets. Two were the cast pieces shown in an earlier post, a large stone turquoise and pearl bracelet that I haven’t photographed yet because I think I want to change the clasp, this pearl and two color turquoise piece

 and today’s turquoise and jasper bracelet. 

Yesterday a neighbor called and said that he’d caught the kittens that he’d told me about a few weeks ago. He, Ed, showed up about ten minutes later with a cat carrier loaded with two kittens, a male and a female. We took the male, a nice stripey little thing about the size of a soft ball. I am very happy to have a cat again. Colman took this shot of us on the deck this afternoon. He seems to be adjusting, he’s very vocal. We think we’ll call him Henry.  

Have spent most of the weekend sheltered from Hannah working in the basement. I borrowed Keith’s drill and bought some large lag bolts so that I could mount the vise on my stump.  Gennady had said (classes have started at FIT) that I didn’t need a stake to hammer against while raising a form, just a piece of steel. I had already collected some steel pipe scraps at Home Depot to use as large mandrels so I cleaned them up and put one in the vise to see how it would work. It did work. It’s given me a lot of time to watch my hammer strikes and begin to figure out what is happening, I was concentrating so hard on the raising part of the process that I didn’t notice that I was shrinking the diameter of the base, very strange, I will ask Gennady on Thursday what I was doing wrong. I’m working on a test piece to see if I can make something to size, our class assignment is to make an object. That object has to match our drawing of it. . . Here are a few of the drawings I made for that project which will be made in silver. The copper dish on my desk is the test piece before I diminished its base this weekend.

Last week I picked up some more castings at Roni. It took me a couple of hours on Saturday to assemble the bracelets and I soldered all the links on Sunday. Here they are on my bench top before soldering.

Here’s a shot of me in the basement where I am raising and soldering. After clearing Hanna’s broken branches out of the yard this morning, I tried to regain some diameter on the copper test piece. I regained about 5 mm which is about 15 mm short of what I lost. The shape is nice but it won’t come close to the drawing.

Yes it has been a long time since I last wrote. Life has been complicated.  Invitations to make and deliver, then house guests, then Verizon installed our FIOS connection. When we turned in our modem and tv box at Time Warner, we were not told that the email account with earthlink would be cancelled.  It took me all day to figure out what was wrong, and then only when I got an earthlink tech on the telephone was I told that the account had been closed when we disconnected from Time Warner. Apparently when the data bases don’t match there is an automatic disabling of email and all items sent are bounced back to the sender, without notifying the receiver that this is taking place.  I said to the tech,  Con Ed sends ‘about to discontinue’ service notices,  the gas companies do it , the telephone companies do it, why doesn’t Earthlink do it?  Time Warner should have said something while we were there turning in the boxes. It’s the polite thing to do.  When he told me it was an automatic event when the data bases don’t match, I said to him that a part of that automatic protocol should be to send a last warning email to the client, not to simply drop them with no notice so they have no idea what may be wrong with their email. He said he would pass my comments on to his supervisors.  

Other than that, I have been making new jewelry and have ben figuring out how to use casting to make more pieces toward developing a line.  The first thing I made was this brooch, no casting here, all fabrication, it is the first time I have used gold in a piece. It made me nervous, gold solder, gold balls for granulation and unexpected effects putting the two metals together. I visited Gennady out in Long Island about a month ago and was totally awed, mostly by the number of tools he has for doing and making anything out of metal. The work he’s doing is also on a level I couldn’t have imagined. I have never been so moved. He looked at my setting before I had set the stones and suggested remedies for the problem I had, as it turned out I didn’t have to resort to the more exotic removal techniques, the color changes I saw in the gold were microscope thin and were easily removed with a little rouge. Here’s how it turned out. 

With this piece I have also learned that I need to do ALL of the chasing before I set the stones (turquoise and Jade).  It’s just that when the stones were set, the spaces between them opened up more than I expected, I felt a need to add a little more texture. Adding those few marks gave rise to reflections on what had been a near pristine back side. 

Cast pieces were used in this bracelet. I made an oval setting and added wires to the top and bottom, in the mold the wires simply extend from the oval like spider legs. Once the castings arrived, I cleaned them up and turned one set of side wires into horizontal loops, soldered them closed and then began to assemble the chain by making vertical loops on the opposite side, connecting them with another oval setting. Once the chain was made, I added findings, soldered them in place and tumbled the whole bracelet for about 2 hours. Setting the stones, quartz with epidote and laboradorite cabochons in this piece, was harder than setting them in hand built bezels. That’s because these are sterling and they had been hardened in the tumbling mill. Hand built bezels are usually fine silver, softer, even after tumbling.

This week I finished a few maltese crosses, 5 castings were made with the intention of finishing them by chasing and adding decorations to the plain crosses. This first one has no decoration, just polishing and the stone. It’s about 1.75 inches across with a 10 mm turquoise stone.

The second cross has been chased, stained and granulated, I call it a leopard cross for all the spots. Colman pressed me to decorate sooner than I was ready to do it, he doesn’t think the unadorned crosses are enough. He’s usually right, I intend to put these two up on etsy where I can take a count of views to determine taste/demand in the market place.  

Today I finished a pair of earrings that also involve cast silver.  I sawed parts of the casting off to make these post type earrings, the pieces were hammered and granulated with 14 kt gold balls. The lemon quartz briolettes are hung with fine gauge 14 kt gold wire. 

The earrings are a little over an inch long. There are other pieces planned with these cast shapes, more earrings first and then a chain.  Here’s what part of my bench looked like when I stopped to photograph and blog tonight.  More, sooner than later, I promise.

Have not been writing because I wanted to install the Word Press upgrade, which always sets me on edge, and because I’ve been busy or pre-occupied lately.  I have managed to create and add a Jewelry Gallery on my main website.  It will eventually become a store using some of PayPal’s merchant services as I get accustomed to using those new tools. Have joined a local internet business group, they have shown me where to find tools and introduced me to the advances in PayPal’s  services. Here’s the link directly to the new Jewelry and Metalwork Gallery . It will open in a new window and is accessible from a new button on my home page. 

 Until next time, Good Night.

Have been quite busy of late and have not posted for a while. I’ll catch up a little later, the Wordpress upgrade has me a little concerned and will deal with that in the near future too.   

This week I’ve been making boxes.  A lot of them.  These first pieces are for presentations. This is the stack as I began to cover the first four.

I seem to have misplaced the finished boxes  photo.

Another box project involved some fancy covering with marbled papers.  The little boxes are to hold a stack of cards. There are a dozen in total, first uncovered. 

And today they are covered.

Meanwhile, on the front porch an anthurium Scherzianum rothschildii has been in bloom.

I am finally getting around to writing about the Anja and Austin’s Wedding Weekend. Things have been pretty busy and I haven’t had enough time to edit the photos and get them into this blog. Al’s wife Linda put an album of photos online using the Google Picasa album uploader. I looked into it tonight and found a Mac version that works very well. I’m still going to put a few photos here and write some captions, the album can then fill in with other shots. You can get to mine here (the Friday Family Brunch) and see Linda’s (the wedding day).

I intend to get to the Wedding, but that may take a few more days. We all began to gather at an inn in Westport Point, MA Friday about noon. People were arriving from Geneva, Barcelona, the West Coast, Virginia as well as more local states.

After greetings and champagne we began to take places at the tables outside under a tent roof.  This is what I picked up from the buffet. 

While we were eating I tried to get some shots of everyone at each of the six large tables, here are a few of them, the rest are in the Album. Apologies to anyone I may have missed.  

 First, the Bride and Groom, Anja and Austin.

Anja’s cousins Angelia and Dominik with her dad, Adi and Austin’s dad John.

Austin’s Aunts Diane and Trish.

Austin’s grandmother, Mary and Tom.

Colman and Jill

Lindsey and Austin’s Best Man, Luke.

Barbara and Austin’s brother Evan.

Evan’s bride, Suda, they will be married in August, with Sabine and Peggy.

I’m sitting with Mike and Titian,  Taybin and Cat were sitting with us and he took this photo for me. 

 John made an entertaining presentation with pictures of Austin growing up, giving Anja some additional insight about what she’s likely to encounter over the years. It was a pleasant afternoon, the company was good and conversations were lively.

Before leaving, some of us walked out on the inn’s back lawn toward the water. I liked seeing this Witch weathervane in the company of so many American Flags. 

These marbled roses were growing near the spot where Sabine and Gisela were talking. 

Wednesday I went into the city to deliver some work and pick up my order from the casters on 46th street. As I passed by the diamond building site, I saw surveyors working at street level through a window cut into the building site barricade.You can barely see their tripod through the mesh. 

This is the best view I could get of the foundation still being poured since my usual window was occupied. 

Thursday we left Staten Island for Danielson to go to Anja and Austin’s wedding over the weekend.  The traffic was unbelievable for a mid morning Thursday, there was a slow  but moving line waiting for passage on the Washington Bridge. Here’s what it looked like in Fort Lee, after the Washington Bridge traffic, before we got onto the Palisades parkway.

When we got to Danielson, we found out that Al’s show was being opened that night in Norwich.  We had driven north for the show two weeks ago but the show was unceremoniously closed by a Fire Marshall about an hour before people were to arrive. 

We got to Adi and Sabine’s where other family members had arrived from New York and the west coast for the wedding weekend. Colman and I were staying with our friends Pam and Marty. I noticed this inch long moth on the wall outside the kitchen door. It was an unusual shape.

I bothered it a little and it flew down to the deck. 

We had dinner with Pam, Marty and their daughter Kelsey in their home and then they drove us to Norwich for Al’s opening. Norwich is a beautiful place, the city is in the process of a LOT of renovation. Al’s show is in one of the newly renovated spaces. Taybin and Cat were standing just outside the doors when we arrived. 

We were not among the first to arrive, the large room was full of people. Here are Anja and Titian.

It was good to see Al’s work in a gallery setting. These are large ink drawings on acetate, here are a few of the pieces.   

This one is attached to a floor sculpture by a banded string, barely visible in this photo.

Here are Al and Linda. 

 Marty and Pam with Adi and Anja between them. 

It was twilight as we left the show, this is the side of a bank across the street from the show space. I was surprised by the way suburbs were immediately behind the impressive architecture.  

I like the way porches can be a transitional space between public and private places. This one has intricate wood work that was bright in the twilight.  

Last night Colman went to the annual auction at the Staten Island Orchid Society.  He came home with a number of plants, this cattleya is particularly striking. 

I’ve just finished a few new pieces of jewelry. Purchasing the tumbling mill last week has given me the ability to finish, polish and harden metal at home so I don’t have to go into the studios at FIT to use their machines. The tumbler uses steel shot instead of the steel pins in the magnetic polishers at school. The pins shined and hardened the pieces but left a finely marked surface that wasn’t always appropriate, the steel shot takes a lot longer but gives the pieces a brighter, burnished surface that I like better. the pendants were pieces that I made a long time ago but never finished for one reason or another. The bracelet is all new, made with cast bezels and finished with a forged toggle of my own design. I’ll be putting these pieces up on my Etsy store in a day or two. Here are the pendants. This ‘Moon and Earth’ pendant is about 2 inches wide. 

The oval is large,  about 3 x 4 inches.

All the stones in the bracelet are 10 x 12 mm, marbled khaki turquoise alternating with oval Jade cabochons. It’s about 7.75 inches long 

I made several stops in the Diamond District before heading downtown, here’s a progress shot of the foundation for the new Diamond Building. Since I’m in the area about once a week I’ll take progress shots as the building goes up, I haven’t heard how tall it will be yet and am not sure I will like having all the dealers in a vertical arrangement. It’s so much more convenient to walk the street like a Mall to see all the dealers displays, it will change the street dramatically if they are all contained in a tower. 

After delivering and shopping at to New York Central Art Supply I decided it would be easier to walk up to 20th street to see Marge at Talas and then on to visit Weldon Design.  As I approached Union Square from Fourth Avenue the skies darkened as a storm was passing threateningly overhead. Sunlight was still getting through and it lit the New York Life Tower as if it were set in an opera. I took these shots just before crossing 14th street and entering the park.  

Crossing into Union Square I was surprised to see that the market has expanded to practically encompass the park, it was teeming with shoppers and all kinds of fresh produce, baked goods, art, plants and peoples pets.