Well it was there last time I looked. . .

The other day somebody bought one of my cufflink sets on Etsy.

'Hooray!' I said and trundled over to the shelf where I keep my jewelry stuff and pulled out the most likely box.
Nope, not in that one. No worries, it will be in the box with my other cufflinks. . .
Nope. . . OK, well it should have been in that box, maybe I put it somewhere else, though I can't think why. .

Yeah well, you can see where this is going. The cufflinks weren't anywhere they ought to have been or anywhere they didn't ought to have been, and I still haven't a clue what happened to them. I looked everywhere. . About six times. . . Grrrr. . .

I shamefacedly contacted the buyer, apologised profusely and explained. I suggested I could try to make a replacement set, send a photo to see whether she thought the replacement was adequate, and if not give a refund. She said that was a good idea, so I set to.

As I set up the necessary bits and pieces, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to document the process as I hadn't tried that before, so I took shots of the various stages of my image transfer and nasty aging process and montaged them into a series of jpgs for your amusement. I hope you're easily amused. It's almost a tut, but would need work to make it coherent enough for that. It's more of an experiment. I might try documenting stuff again but with more care and a better set up.

1- cut out images from laser print/photocopy sheet.
2- cut out squares of polymer clay, thickest setting on the pasta machine.
3- trimmed images and squares.

4- place the images face down on the squares and rub gently with your finger to ensure contact.
5- add water and let it sit for a minute.
6- gently rub away the paper with your finger in a circular motion, adding water from time to time. Go easy as it can start to smudge after a while.
7- the image/soft clay will probably distort a bit if you aren't careful enough. I wasn't.

8- don't do what I did and forget to place the squares on a small tile to start with. I had to lift them off my work tile with a blade, which also distorts the shape. Not a big issue this time as I wanted a slightly irregular shape.
9- put small tile in oven. I did 25 mins at usual temperature.
10- baked squares. The camera angle makes them look more distorted than they were.
11- selectively attack with medium sandpaper.

12- results of selective sandpaper attack.
13- I painted the surface with greyish alcohol ink diluted with isopropyl - ratio 1 ink 2 iso p.
14- gently added renaissance wax, but rubbed it in too hard. see top right of left square, the blue has come off leaving purple/magenta where blue should be. Ren wax will take the image off if you aren't careful.
15- buffed with dremel thingy after ren wax had dried for ten mins or so.

16 - the final result. Overdid it, so I made another less messed up version.

This is a pic of the second, less messed up version I made. These made it to the stage of cufflinks. Check the pic below of the 'lost' original ones and see if I got close. The originals weren't quite as brown in real life as in the photo btw.

Let's hope the buyer gives the OK. ;-)

Jon x

Man Stuff

Somebody on a forum I hang around on said that my work had a 'masculine' vibe to it. I have no problem with that assertion, I don't have much interest in the prettier more delicate side of things.

(Not that I deem pretty and delicate to just be something that interests women, you understand. I draw a distinction between 'female' and 'feminine', just as I would between 'male' and 'masculine'. Pretty and delicate is generally classed as 'feminine' while the more rugged and chunky side of things is generally considered to be 'masculine'. I'll go with the generally accepted view for the sake of convenience if nothing else. All that 'sex vs gender' stuff gets complicated pretty quick so I will back off before I mess up too badly.)

So, my work has a masculine vibe.

An addendum to that remark was that I might consider making jewellery for men.

This wasn't something I had considered, having only recently started making jewellery at all, and not really thought deeply about who it might be for. . . So I had a scout around online to see what was what in the adornment for chaps department.

Well, there's a fair bit of it about. Quite a lot of chunks of grey metal on thick leather thong, sub David Beckham kind of stuff. Not very me. The other end of the scale seemed to be the hippy guy stuff, rough ethnic beads worn in festoons. Fun but a bit too hippy. There's a sort of 'Man of the Woods' style with it's fair share of chunky clay, wood, leather and twisted hessian. But it's all a bit hairy chested for me. ( I had a hair on my chest once, but it has long since departed. I cry about it sometimes. .)
There's also something that categorises itself as 'beach', which seems to be quite simple stones or beads on a simple thread/thong. Quite nice but my nearest beach is miles away, pretty crap as far as surf goes, and freezing cold most of the year, so I can't get inspired thinking of beaches really. (Although, there is a place called California just a bit further away. Trouble is, it's a basically a bleedin great caravan site as far as I remember and nothing even vaguely like the 'real' California. makes me smile to think of the comparison though. It's entirely likely that it was called California way before the other California. . . hah!)

I guess if I were to go down the road of making male jewellery I would want to situate myself somewhere in the middle of all the above. Kind of Surfing Hippy Man of the Woods with sub David Beckham tendencies. (Google that!)
So anyway, I made this.

Any views on it's gender pretensions? I actually wore it round the house to see how it felt and looked. I thought it was pretty cool. . . Your mileage may vary. . . ;-)
best,
Jon