My So Charmed Life

School Projects: Ring & Bowl

12.22.11

So the way the first-year metalsmithing class worked was that complex projects were assigned for completion, and you pretty much worked on your own to figure things out. It was VERY self-directed and extraordinarily challenging.

The hollow-form ring pictured above was the second project, and I was more or less clueless for the duration of this one. I was still struggling with the &^#$!@ saw, which you can see in the flame cut-outs, and I honestly didn’t fully understand the end-product concept while I was working through the various steps to build and solder this thing. A big shout-out to substitute teacher WanJin (who studied at Cranbrook and Parsons) for help with the impossible soldering! BTW, locals, you should take Wanjin’s Crafts class at MoCo. She really rocks.

FYI, everyone’s rings were gigantic, that was the point of this exercise. When it was all done, I understood what I’d been through and felt I might be able to do it again more skillfully. That said, the number of man-hours to make something like this is absolutely mindboggling. Anyway, not a thing of great beauty, but fun, and I learned a lot. Now on to another even uglier object!

Another project to struggle through, hammering a flat piece of 18g metal into the shape of a bowl, and then affixing a base. OMG people!

I was all but ready to abandon this thing but b/c the bf somehow really liked it, I finished soldering the base on the last day of class, filled it with candy, and gifted it to him for Chanukah. I think what might have been hard for me to love about this one was that there wasn’t really a lot of self-expression built into this project and it just wasn’t a form or functional object that truly intrigued me in any way.

Of course I suppose one could turn it upside down and wear it as a hat… (runs to take bowl back from bf…).