While I was catching up on emails and adding some finishing touches to my rooster belt buckle prototype, Dustin and Kate dreamed up a series of Calder-inspired pieces to be worn at The Glitterganza at the Mingei Museum in April. You can read about it HERE.
With our Get-It-Done enthusiasm, we summoned up our Inner Calders and made a beeline over to the local Ace Hardware store and picked up some nice footage of copper wire in various gauges. When we got back to the Atomic Ranch, we hammered and hammered and hammered.
Above is a picture of Kate McKinnon double-fisting butane torches, annealing the heavy gauge wire from both ends. Hardcore!
Kate sports one of her roughed out crown designs crafted from copper wire. The finished pieces will have moveable parts and decorative embellishments. 
photo courtesy of Kate McKinnon
I got out a stamp set from PJ Tool & Supply. You should definitely check out their new line of metal stamps called ImpressArt. The stamps come in a variety of fun fonts and interesting characters. I definitely recommend them. Not only are the stamps really nice quality, but the guys running the show behind the scenes are awesome!
Above is a bracelet that I hammered out. It was a nice re-introduction to forging and working with such heavy wire. While it is simple and unembellished, don't let it fool you. It took hundreds of blows to hammer out the heavy-gauge wire and forge it into a bracelet. I love the texture of the hammer strokes and their uneven beauty. It has the nice feel of "sturdy". When I'm dead and buried and a dozen more generations walk among the earth and are interred themselves, this bracelet will still be around unless it is purposefully put to an end. It's the kind of thing that the archeologists of tomorrow will uncover. The blows of the hammer – the hammer held in my hand – will ring on far into the future.
6 comments:
Love it!
It looks like fun! I love your bracelet's simple beauty!
metalsmithing is irresistible to me for its capacity to endure beyond me.
I see the Internets as the metalsmithing of writing. Once something enters the web, it is strikingly difficult to remove.
I think thousands of blows is more like what it took to forge this; you worked it for a long time.
Cool bracelet -- I loved your Archeologists of the Future thoughts! I work for archeologists (I produce their reports), and many times when I've been photographing some artifacts, I wonder about the person who made the pot or flaked away the rock, etc. Unlike us, those people had no concept of the Archeologists of the Future. But I think about them all the time :)
Great piece. Think I need to drag out my hammers.
I like your blond want to now follow you , thanks for mentioning the stamps, I will check it out!
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