This blog is about the many things of interest to me – from photography, jewellery making, my garden, walking, the natural world and the English Lake District.
As a follow up to my previous post, I’ve now finished another couple of pairs of copper earrings that I’ve etched using a design resist that I’ve cut in vinyl using the Silhouette cutter.
Etched copper earrings, cut into a fan shape and given a slight curl.
It gives a different type of etch from previous results obtained with printed resists, where more tiny detail and texture was possible – if you could print it and it would transfer to the copper, it could be part of the design. But the Silhouette cut resists are much more black and white and bold clear lines.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all, just different. I’m really enjoying thinking about what might work and drawing designs in the software.
I’ve barely even touched on working from my own sketched designs, I still have a head full of ideas to work through using vectored drawings created from scratch in the software.
Fan shaped copper earrings featuring delicate scrolls, inspired by Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau lines.
These fan shaped earrings feature delicate curls inspired from some Arts and Crafts Movement designs I was looking at – with delicate and elegant lines – and I tried to capture some of that feeling. The fan shape was one I’ve drawn in my sketchbook many times to use with metal clay, but not found it easy to get the delicacy of shape that I envisioned – it always seemed to come out too clunky. Being able to draw the shape in software and then use it with quite thin copper sheet (to keep such large earrings light), allowed me to realise the idea rather better – so it’s always worth holding on to some ideas until all the right elements come together.
Geometric design inspired by a glimpse of some 40 year old wallpaper.
This pair of oval earrings were born as an idea whilst watching a home improvement programme on TV – where they showed a room that hadn’t been decorated since the 70s. There was some garish geometric wallpaper on one wall and I only got a glimpse of it, but it sparked an idea for some overlapping shapes. My son commented that they had a retro feel, so I explained what gave me the initial idea and he said that he bet that the wallpaper in question was orange and brown – and it was indeed.
I’ve always favoured my copper to have a polished finish and put a lot of effort and dirty fingers into achieving it. But I decided with these etched pieces, to leave them with a darker more satin surface, it seemed fitting for the designs.
I was also concerned that the flat even and very reflective surface of the polished copper sheet might present a glare hazard to anyone talking to the wearer if they caught the sun as the earrings jiggled as they moved. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for giving anyone spots before their eyes!
Etched copper earrings with a deep patina and satin surface finish.Retro style pattern etched into antiqued copper oval earrings.
I mentioned in my last post that I was a new owner of a Silhouette cutting machine and having great fun with it. My initial intentions were to use it as a supplementary tool for my metal clay work – for making texture plates, stencils and actually cutting design elements directly from thinly rolled clay itself. But the more I read about it and watched YouTube tutorials of it in use (before I even got it), the more I realised it was an incredibly versatile piece of kit and I knew it would be well used, for a variety of different types of work.
The various stages of the etching process; vinyl resist, clean copper plate, newly etched copper sheet, cut and polished earring shapes and at the front, a finished pair of antiqued copper earrings.
Whilst I’ve certainly made great headway in the metal clay direction, already having made several new texture plates and templates (and many birthday cards and gift boxes), the more I work with it, the more ideas it sparks – and it was such a tangential thought that has kept me occupied for the last few days.
I’ve spent time in the past doing salt water etching and whilst I loved the results and enjoyed the process, a key element to the success of the pieces I was etching was an old laser printer that I used for the resist designs – making a black and white print onto coated paper and then ironing this resist design onto the prepared copper surface – in itself, a very tedious and haphazard process. But my old printer started giving progressively inferior results and once I got a new (to me) laser printer from Freecycle, I decommissioned the old machine. But modern machines don’t use the toners that worked so well with such processes, so my etching was put on hold as newer techniques got my attention.
A newly etched piece of copper just marked up to cut into a pair of earrings.
But having cut out some designs in adhesive vinyl to use as opaque masters to make photopolymer plates, I wondered if the vinyl itself might stick directly on copper to act as a resist – it stuck so cleanly to clear acrylic that I thought it was likely it would stick well to copper too. So I dusted off my etching equipment – luckily all put away together and complete – and gave it a go.
It works a treat – better than I dared hope. Etching is one of those processes where 90% of the effort is in the proper preparation – you simply can’t cut corners or try to sidestep any stages. The better your preparation, the better the results are likely to be – that effort really does pay dividends. So it can take a frustratingly long time to get to the good stuff and the fun part.
The very best bit of course is peeling off all the protective stuff you’ve stuck to the copper to prevent the non-design parts etching, to see if it worked. You can’t get a proper idea of the success of the etch until you see it all – sometimes a piece that looks good initially is spoiled by an edge of the mask lifting and leaving a streak of erroneous and unattractive etching where it’s not wanted.
Obviously, preparing a graphic to use in this manner requires some time in the Silhouette software, but I’m really enjoying that aspect of the work – drawing all of the designs shown myself from scratch as vector drawings. It has allowed me to revisit design ideas in my sketch book that I’d struggled to realise with other methods.
A newly etched copper design for a pair of fan shaped earrings. I made these curly tendril shapes after looking at some gorgeous Arts and Crafts pieces and wanting to capture some of that feeling.
It also requires a slightly different thinking and the vinyl resist is of a different nature from a graphic created to print out – you don’t want delicate details unattached to other design elements, or overlapping so that they cut bits off each other and you don’t want lots of tiny holes between elements that will make it tricky to get a clean result without any rogue bits of sticky vinyl. You also need a good mix of dark and light areas to give a balanced result.
But this has been a most enjoyable and bonus diversion – I’d never even considered etching in my deliberations over the Silhouette – even if I never use it for anything other than birthday cards and etched designs, it will totally justify my family’s investment in it for me. Not to mention that I’m truly enjoying working with it.
My first finished pair of earrings – featuring a delicate leafy design I digitally drew myself.The top of the etched earring required a little thought for the design of an earwire that would allow it to move freely, not just have a huge round eye. I settled on a little hammered scroll, which allowed me a longer teardrop loop.
I’ve also really enjoyed working with the design software and find it very powerful for creating what I want – you just need to think about the structure of a shape and which drawing tools will create the shape you want. I’ve always been fascinated with the regular repeating patterns in Moorish architecture and I’ve done a bit of tinkering with patterns formed from a repeating element – the geometric tools within the Silhouette studio software make such tasks a doddle and it’s astonishing to me that moving a shape just a little, creating more overlap or rotating the angle can give rise to an infinite number of different designs from a few simple shapes.
Geometric patterns formed by using either very regular or totally irregular shapes to create repeating patterns.
I love this particular walk, where there’s a patch of sweet chestnut trees. I enjoy taking this kind of photo too – a wide angle macro from a low position, showing the scene behind and therefore context – I call them macro landscapes.
It can’t have escaped your notice that my blogging has been sporadic of late, despite the fact that I usually love doing it.
I don’t think my tardiness is entirely my own fault – I think I must lay some of the blame at the door of Blogger, my previous home. I don’t want to rubbish it too much as it has served me well over several years, but I’ve found it increasingly difficult and problematic to post.
I’ve abandoned several recent posts because I either just couldn’t get a photo to appear on the page, or because it repeatedly appeared in the wrong place on the page. It got old pretty fast, so ended up totally sucking the joy out of the process. Hence I never posted some earlier photos from my holiday in September, so I’ll pepper some through my ramblings here. Just because I now can!
We had some fabulous glorious weather in the Lakes in September. We rarely see the Langdales this clearly.
I’ve had reason recently to install a WordPress blog into some hosting for a client and having not tinkered with it for many years, suddenly found it significantly easier to use – possibly because it was loaded directly into the web host server and the same location as the image files etc.
Because I have the same hosting for my own site and found a plugin to import my entire Blogger content, I’ve decided to move it here onto my own site. I’ve had to iron out a few wrinkles and edit a lot of links, but it’s now in a reasonably complete state.
Once within posts, any links to other recent blogs, are still likely to take you back to the Blogger version of the site, but I’ll gradually try to correct these as I find them, so apologies if it appears a little disjointed at the moment.
I love this tree lined walk, especially in autumn and even better when the sunlight filters through.
If you want to find an earlier post and have some idea of the title, I’ve added a site page called Index of Posts that lists all of the posts I’ve made, linked to their new copies here on the site – it’s also listed at the top of each page and in the side widget.
Blea Tarn in the English Lake District on a gorgeous clear, still autumn day.
So, what else have I been up to:
I don’t think that I have that much new to show you, the run up to Christmas involved making a lot of the good sellers for seasonal sales and re-stocking the shop – not much pure design or tinkering time unfortunately. I’m itching to get on with some new pieces, my sketchbook is overflowing and my head bursting with ideas.
Leaf-set pendant featuring my own faux jade polymer clay cabochon.
I did manage to fire and finish a new cabochon pendant, which thankfully went out as a Christmas present. This features a cabochon I made myself in translucent polymer clay as a faux green jade stone – with lots of sanding, polishing and layers of varnish to give it a deep gloss.
The cab has been leaf-set to a thick copper base, each leaf being individually cut and textured and carefully added to the base, interspersed with tiny copper balls.
The back has an appliqued design featuring several gently curling tendrils accompanied by lots of tiny hand cut leaves and more of the tiny copper balls I find myself rather obsessed with making.
Back of the cabochon pendant, decorated with slender sinuous tendrils and tiny leaves.Side view of the pendant showing the leaf prongs and back decoration.
I do have two new techniques I’ve been tinkering with – when time allows – and which will work well together. Low temperature enamelling and my family gave me a Silhouette cutting machine for my recent birthday. I’ve been interested in using enamels for adding colour to copper and although I have a kiln, the high temperatures required do give me the willies. I have the option to kiln fire, torch fire, or work with low temperature powders.
Enamel designs on stainless steel sliding lid pill boxes. I made these as stocking filler Christmas gifts.
I decided that due to the low cost and ease of use of the efcolor powders that I’d at least start with these to see if I like the results, as I had some ideas in mind to try. If I do find I want to pursue it, I can then perhaps step up to something more robust.
Although having said that, I’ve found the results to be pretty substantial – I had one piece that I didn’t like and wanted to remove the colour, so that I could do something new with and I actually found it very hard to remove – so I’m hoping that they might withstand a decent amount of wear.
Sliding lid pill box tins with enamelled decoration.
These ideas tie in nicely with the Silhouette cutting machine. I had in mind several ideas where this would allow me to make things I couldn’t achieve any other way – one of which was making my own stencils and texture plates as well as the possibility of cutting thinly rolled clay too.
I’ve only had it just over a week and already have a hard drive full of files, lots of saved design elements and a desk covered in tiny bits of cutting shrapnel, that no matter how much care you take removing it, ends up everywhere.
It’s been a while since I did any vector drawing (and it was only ever small amounts), but it has been enormous fun getting to know it again. I haven’t even started on importing designs to make cutting files, or scanning any of my own sketches, everything so far has been drawn from scratch in the supplied Silhouette Studio software – they describe it as having basic drawing tools, but I’m already finding it pretty powerful. I love taking a simple shape and manipulating it into something entirely different – then merging shapes into complex geometrical designs, welding them with lettering etc. You have to think differently of course, shapes overlapping don’t necessarily work and shapes stranded in open space don’t either, so you have to start and think in . . . guess what . . . silhouettes!
I’ve been creating vector drawings for stencils and making photo polymer texture plates.
I’ve already decided after one post that this WordPress blog is going to work better for me, it addresses all of the things that frustrated me with recent changes to Blogger, so I hopefully will feel inclined to post more often. I still have several tutorial ideas I wanted to post, so maybe now that will be possible. I’m also thinking that little and often might be better. 😉
I thought I was doing well with remembering to post more frequently, but I see with horror that it’s already well over 2 weeks since my last post. It’s alarming how the weeks flash past. Not that I have much of interest to post.
I’ve found myself easily distracted over the last week or two with the amusing antics of the current broods of baby birds in the garden. There’s this lovely delicious stage shortly after fledging when they’re out in the big wide world for the first time, yet not fully ready for it. The stage when they fly in the oddest manner, more like bumble bees than birds – while they perfect the act of steering whilst in flight and hone the amazingly agile skills that adult birds demonstrate with jealousy-inducing ease.
Please click on any of the photographs for a larger version. You may be able to middle click to open them in a new tab at the size I prepare them.
It’s lovely to see so many bees in the garden, it always feels like summer when you can see their constant business and activity.
I did the RSPBs garden bird count earlier in the year – I try to do it each year, not only for the data this adds to the RSPB’s efforts, but for my own interest too – I keep a copy of my count and like to compare it year on year. This year I had a really good selection on the day of the count, but was aware that there were much fewer tits than I’d normally expect, yet more of the slightly rarer species like bullfinches – I had 6 (3 pairs) at the same time that one day. Yet I only counted one each of blue tits and great tits, expecting more as they’re usually a garden staple.
But hopefully that meant they were just elsewhere that particular day as I now have a good crop of youngsters of each species. The garden has been alive with them – I reckon at least 8 of each at the moment – and they’ve given me more than enough pleasure this month to justify my bird food budget.
Lots of young birds in the garden this spring.
One thing that they’ve been up to that I can’t say I’ve noticed before is a seeming fixation with water. I have 3 different bird baths in the bird area and pretty much every time I look, there are baby birds in and around all of them. In fact they’ve got such a pool party thing going on with various splashing and drinking that I’m having to go out and top them up at least once every day.
My neighbour has a little water feature in her garden that has a circulating body of water that falls as a little fountain into a pool – the baby birds have been having even more fun in hers – washing vigorously under the fountain part – that she’s having to top it up daily too. She also noticed that this seems to be a new phenomena this year. Maybe the mild winter didn’t kill off as many parasites as usual and they feel the need for more vigorous bathing this spring.
Being babies, there does seem to have been a lot of time perching on the edge of the water wondering quite what they should do. There are often two or three at once, and it looks for all the world like they’re trying to build up the courage to jump in and the others are offering the necessary encouragement. I just haven’t been able to catch a decent photograph of the action as the baths the babies prefer is in a sheltered spot in deep shadow.
This little fella stepped into the shallower of my baths and just stood there a while, testing the sensation on his feet, waiting to see if anything terrible happened. He ventured to drink a little, paddled round a bit, sat down in it, paddled some more. Stood looking around as if waiting for inspiration or help from above from a friend, then suddenly decided to just go for it – he flapped his wings vigorously splashing water everywhere, then sat for a moment, all fluffed up and wet, just taking stock of what had just happened, had he suffered any harm? Deciding that he hadn’t, he flapped vigorously some more and was gone to shake off in the sun. I felt rather privileged to share his first time with him.
The gravel chippings in that garden seemingly make for a good sun trap when the sun is actually on them and I’ve seen a whole parade of birds this week lying with their wings outstretched, soaking up the rays, although it’s the blackbirds I see most often. Having lain for quite some time with his wings fully out, he tucked them back and rolled over a little, presumably to warm his tummy.
We managed one evening walk out this week and as we sat in the car contemplating coming home, were treated to a lovely sunset. With sunsets of this nature, it always looks to me as though the intense colour of the sky is at the expense of the landscape, which ends up looking dark and colourless as the sun makes its departure, taking the colour of the day over the horizon with it.
Work this week:
I’ve had this particular connector idea in mind for some time and finally got to trying it this week after coiling some wire for another piece and it reminded me. As is often the case with new designs, it takes a few ‘prototypes’ to perfect the methodology and overcome snags, but I am now in the regular habit of keeping a detailed design journal, so that once I have settled on a method, I record it in longhand detail and can easily return to the design to re-make it without having to re-think it each time. As you make things, you might find that it works best to work a particular end first, or to hammer or polish a section before making up as you can’t reach it later etc. So keeping a ‘recipe’ for the workflow for any particular design, as well as measurements and gauges of wire used, has proved to be well worth the time and discipline it takes me at the time.
Downloading the latest photographs, I noticed that I was almost at image no. 28,000 in my jewellery photography camera. I do take a lot of duplicates, even of the same view, variously for optional focus or exposure to see which I prefer. So I did a quick tot up of how many of these images actually make it to finally sell the item – I think that I have now ‘published’ over 4,200 jewellery images (and each one is done at least two finished sizes), selling something like 800 different pieces, an average of over 5 images per item. If I were to spend 15 minutes on each published image; taking, cropping, retouching, saving and uploading it – wait for it – that represents over 1000 hours of work, which is over 26 working weeks! No wonder it seems like a perpetual task!
A longer version made with dyed blue jade faceted stones, spiral wrapped on polished paddle pins. The earrings co-ordinate with the Y shaped necklace below which features a chunkier version of the ‘coil on coil’ wrap and a large faceted jade pendant.
