Classes with Kieu: Day Two...

What a jam-packed day full of activity!  The day started out with a morning class.  We took the Weave It To Metal class, where we learned how to make soldered woven metal pendants.

Here's the piece that I made!  We had a lot of fun in class.  My piece isn't perfect, but there's a lot of potential packed in it.  I keep imagining this technique on a larger scale.  Maybe in a cuff with mixed metals.  When I was in college, I used to do all kinds of woven paper collages, so there's something nice about revisiting this process of taking little things and bringing them together.

Here's a picture of William soldering on his ring shank in the afternoon class.  We made the CosmoPearlitan cocktail rings.

One of the nice things that resulted from these classes is that William has expressed an interest in soldering and it's something that we can share and collaborate over.  So often, we are divided into who is more art oriented and who is more geared towards numbers.  I'm looking forward to exploring these techniques with him.

This a quick snapshot from the afternoon class.  Kieu was demonstrating how to set the metal spiral into the cup.

I ended up changing my project a little bit.  Originally I worked on the spiral to solder in the cup, but I didn't get it in their very good.  So I popped it out and decided that I liked it a lot as is.  So I polished it up and did the interior part of the dome in a sanded, satin finish.  I might play around with it and add a bigger stone... we'll see!

One of the things that I've really been enjoying about these classes is that there's an endless supply of food for thought and these are just stepping stones to bigger ideas!

After the day of classes, we hosted a trunk show and book signing with Kieu at the gallery. It too was a lot of fun and even though there was torrential rain, a few folks came out. I have to say that the book is beautiful and we stocked up on a bunch of awesome tools!

We have one more day of classes left and I'm really looking forward to it!  Tomorrow we will be bezel setting stones in rings.  I'm super excited!