Some pictures of what I've been working on

[cahn]

(note to ambyr: I have also been working on a long Byzantine chain for… uh… six months now, in little bits and pieces. I'm hoping I can actually finish it up this month. I'll try to post a pic when I do.)

So as you probably all know about me by now, I get these obsessions that last anywhere from a couple of weeks to a year long. They're about different things, but fairly reliably I can count on having an obsession every couple of years on some sort of jewelry-making, particularly with gemstones. I was overdue for one of these; pregnancy/nursing hormones this time around made me completely uninterested in gemstones, which was really really weird. I mean, this must be the way the rest of the world feels about them: I would look at a gemstone and think, "That's pretty!" but not feel like I had to do anything with it, or gaze at it obsessively, or (if it wasnt' something I owned) buy it (I don't buy gemstones very much these days, except cheapo lab synthetic stones — it was more of a pre-having-kids sort of thing -- but I always want to buy them, or did), or even feel compelled to look at more pictures of shiny. Then I got below my body's nursing threshold (I'm still nursing for a month or two longer, but only once in the morning) and bam! obsessiveness back again. Mind-body is weird, yo.

Anyhow!

So for the last fifteen years or so (…wow, now I feel old), since I became aware it was possible to actually make jewelry oneself, I've wanted to be able to make carved/sculpted jewelry. I tried to learn wax carving and then I got all excited about Precious Metal Clay (PMC) — now this is actually really cool stuff, it's small particles of silver (or gold, bronze, etc.) mixed with a binder that burns off at low (kiln-attainable) temperatures.

But the problem is that I kind of suck, a lot, at carving and sculpting and playing with clay. This is probably related to the fact that I find it deeply boring. (On the other hand, fabrication — sawing and soldering and drilling and hammering metal — is SUPER COOL and I love it, but I just don't have the physical or the mental space to think about doing that right now.) Also, the other thing I suck at is being careful about finishing work. So I made a couple of small PMC pieces that look, quite frankly, like something one would make in (early) grade school with clay, only were a lot more expensive to produce. (As you might expect, PMC is rather more expensive than silver, which itself hasn't been cheap for a while.)

And PMC is also pure silver — not sterling silver, which is an alloy of silver and other metal (usually copper, sometimes something else cool like germanium). Pure silver is much softer and weaker than sterling silver, so you aren't really supposed to make jewelry out of it. You can, but it will deform and scratch and break really easily. Something like a bracelet is Right Out.

Anyway, to make a long and circuitous story even longer, I just recently found out that I can model stuff with Blender, which for me is way WAY easier than sculpting in real life. (And it's also easier to undo mistakes! which is key!) So, yeah. Apparently the only thing that can make me spend entirely too much time on a steep-learning-curve sort of endeavor of my own volition is the prospect of being able to make Shiny Things. My brain really needs help. (If I could spend anything near like that amount of time on, like, actual Improving Life And/Or Career sorts of things...) I'd mucked around with Google Sketchup several years ago, but it's really not suited for this sort of thing. Blender is, steep learning curve and all. (Uh, and also someone made this awesome plug-in for making gemstone-shapes-for-modeling-purposes and prongs which I am totally using in the projects below.)

Printed at Shapeways (yes, this would be a super money sink if I actually had time to do this hobby properly, but perhaps fortunately, I don't) in Frosted Ultra Detail plastic and gold-plated brass. The former still doesn't fit my wrist properly after two iterations. (The back of the bracelet digs into my wrist.) I think I'm wedded to symmetry and my wrist is just not symmetric. Ah well, maybe iteration three will be the charm. The latter I got right first time out (I printed a prototype copy in plastic, just to see; the gold-plated brass is the second copy) and is going to be a birthday present for my mom. (Actually, the prongs are way too short, but that's okay for a pendant -- wouldn't work for a ring, though, as I would worry the stone wasn't secure enough.)

I seem to be getting off of this particular obsession (…I really don't have the time to obsess about it, which I think my brain is finally understanding), but I hope I can keep doing stuff once in a while, because it's awfully interesting and fun, and amenable to messing around for short stints here and there. And perhaps more to the point, I really like the results. :)

Comments

[ambyr]

Oh, wow, that's super-cool! I'd never even considered exploring 3D-printing for jewelry. (I have worked with precious metal clay, and while I think I like it more than you do, yeah, the expense sure is something.) I love the look of the frosted plastic.

[cahn]

3D printing for jewelry is SO COOL, I am loving it. I'm also much better with computers and numerical calculations than with precision hand work, though, so there's that.

Ha, yeah, I kind of conflated wax carving and PMC -- wax carving is what I found deadly dull. PMC wasn't dull, and I actually rather enjoyed working with it, but I was no good at it at all. And, I dunno, I got a little overwhelmed by how you need a mat and something to roll it out with and clay-working tools and a torch/kiln and... especially now that we have rather less free space and time :)

I also love the frosted plastic. I'd intended to have Shapeways cast the bracelet in silver when I got it working, but I might just stop here. It's really too fragile for jewelry, and the materials safety sheet for the original chemical makes me think it's probably not a good idea to wear it long periods of time in general, but just for display it's awfully pretty.

[thistleingrey]

Those are really lovely. I like the curve on the pendant, in particular.

As has probably become clear, I have decided to let myself obsess about fibercraft as long as I don't buy yarn and cloth, with certain narrow exceptions. It's a release of sorts: not everything can be focused or repurposed towards what one "ought" to do....

(My wrists aren't quite symmetrical at that distance from the bump of the ulna, but I've no idea how usual/unusual it is! There's more tendon and muscle on the underside of the forearm towards the ulnar half, and a visible hollow towards the radial half.)

[cahn]

Ah, thanks! I am really pleased by how the twist in the pendant came out; it's always a bit uncertain seeing how the rendering translates in the actual 3D print.

Ha, yes, that's true. And I really enjoy reading your fibercraft posts.

I think wrists are not in fact symmetric in general (I think I read this somewhere on some jewelry blog, but also it stands to reason from the asymmetry of the torsion), but I don't know how common it is to have visible asymmetry -- looking at my wrist it doesn't seem visibly asymmetric, which is probably why it has taken me so long to realize that is a problem with the design.

[thistleingrey]

*nods* Part of what makes the pendant cool is that you've anticipated a cool aesthetic effect!

Thanks.

Probably my being bony helps here :/
(I'm not actually thin, not anymore, but my left wrist's circumference is 5.3" where a bracelet would go, which means I never wear them because they've never felt comfy. Having a little or a lot of padding actually makes jewelry easier to wear, I surmise.)

[seekingferret]

Cool! Every six months or so I price out 3D printed stainless steel as a comparison to the conventional machine shops we use for some of the more complex parts I design... it's getting really close. We'll be 3D printing a lot of internal components within the next year or two, I'd bet.

Blender terrifies me. I've looked at it once or twice as a potential video editor, but the interface is so crazy.

[cahn]

3D printing is so cool! It's really amazing to me how much has happened in just the last couple of years.

Blender is CRAZY. I mean, it's sort of recognizable as "okay, we kept adding things onto a core that was never designed to be used for the things it's currently being used for," but... yeah, wow. I haven't even touched the video/rendering/animation parts, that's a whole other ballgame.

[umadoshi]

That is so neat! *^^*

[cahn]

Thank you! :) :)

[genarti]

Oh, very cool! And I really like both these designs -- the blue against the frosted plastic and the smooth tidy curves of the gold pendant are both really lovely.

[cahn]

Thank you! :) I've always wanted to do things with curves, and a lot of conventional jewelry methods don't make it super easy to do nice neat curves (you can -- the gold pendant would be doable with fabrication -- but you also have to be better at it than I am to make it tidy :) ) so this was really fun for me.