When heat treating is off

One of my chisels is going blunt really quickly. On closer inspection, I saw that the edge was rolling which means the steel is not properly hardened. This is probably the result of inaccurate tempering. I'll have to harden and temper the chisel again. It's difficult to get a good picture of the rolled edge but here is my attempt.

Adam Garret

Adam Garret is a jeweller/engraver and uses engraving as a major part of the design. The scroll work and intricacy of his pieces are inspiring. He uses inlay, engraving as well as standard goldsmithing techniques to great effect.

Tom Herman

Searching for references to the type of work I have in mind, I found the website of  Tom Herman

Using a mixture of piercing and carving he makes intricate jewellery which seems to echo the use of borders and negative space found in decorative iron work. Although it's not explicit in his website, other articles about him have mentioned the making of tsuba as well as the use of chisels and tiny hammers so i can surmise he is using the same Japanese techniques I am interested in.

This is almost exactly the type of work I picture when I say carving and decorative iron work.

Form beyond function

I've been picking away at my research topic, decorative iron work, or even the recent one of gold and steel. What I've come to realise is that there is a common thread through all my interests.

The need for unnecessary decoration.

I use 'unnecessary' in the sense that, once a clay pot is functional, why incise lines and glaze it?

I've looked to architectural iron work as I am interested in forging, yet that doesn't quite cover the essence of my question. When left to my own devices while making/designing jewellery, I tend to add a scroll, some millgrain or a little engraving. I do this because it pleases me when I see this in other work and I like to imagine the person viewing my work being pleasantly surprised by a little cut out underneath the pearl or whatever. Something akin to the azure method of cutting the underneath of settings.

Underneath of a mabe' setting

Beauty you have to look for

The Iron Brush

The metal artist Ford Hallam sparked an interest in traditional Japanese metal crafting within me. His work is at a master level and is recognised by the Japanese authorities as such. My first encounter was on Vimeo with this video. What impressed me is the absolutely traditional approach without power tools and modern abrasives absent.

Tsuba or sword guard

The subleties of patina

Delicate carving 

Casually amazing inlay technique

The underlying ethos in Japanese carving is to see the chisels as an Iron Brush. To replicate the delicacy of ink and paper drawings in metal.

Different metals and alloys are used for their patination properties. Inlays, overlays, glazes, amalgam gilding and careful control of patina are all used to create pieces which can be studied at length and continue to fascinate.

You can see more of Ford Hallam's work here.

A productive weekend

I managed to get all the elements needed to make my pitch bowl and chisels.

I attached a brake part to a cut off bowls wood and filled most of the cavity with lead. I then melted the pine rosin and added plaster of paris, vegetable oil and a little black colouring. I found the recipe on the Following the Iron Brush forum. It has formed something akin to setters shellac rather than the softer pitch for reppouse. This makes sense as it's job is to hold the piece of metal while both hands are occupied with the hammer and chisel.

I also made a sand bag, just an old pillow case filled with garnet sand I had left over from a different project. Garnet sand great as it is denser than normal sand and the particles are all the same size as it is used in sand blasting.


I also cut old bastard files into strips to make the chisels. I was in contact with another knife maker who does this kind of work and he said old files are the right kind of steel. I still have to anneal the pieces, then shape their faces, then harden and temper them.

Japanese metal carving

Here is a short video showing Ford Hallam applying Japanese style metal carving to a western style motif.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sEmTdx6VuWk

If you watch, you will see a range of techniques I would like to start learning. I am in the process if making the tools I will need, pitch bowl, chisels and scrapers. I will also cut up some abrasive stones as there are places sandpaper and rubber wheels fail to reach when carving like this.

Musings on beauty

The path to beauty
The same as love
Is always changing
Never not a challenge

The path to beauty
The same as love
Requires hardness
But not turning to stone

The path to beauty
The same as love
Requires softness
But not becoming a puddle

The path to beauty
The same as love
Is always uphill
Never a summit

The path to beauty
The same as love
Is
Worth
Every
Breath

Suiseiki

Looking at Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, I found this practice of Suiseiki or rock appreciation.

The aim is to identify and collect rocks from nature and then, with minimal interference, display them. You are allowed to cut the bottom flat, clean, dry and oil stones. The final presentation is judged on various criteria. You can read more at http://www.suiseki.com/about/index.html

What I like about this art form is it seems to express the ultimate goals of the found art genre. A common river rock becomes something people admire because of how it's presented. Those same people could walk past the same rock without a second glance on a nature hike.

Just do your work

Reed beads

Whilst collecting rocks for my garden at the local stream, I was moving these dried reeds out the way when I suddenly saw that they were in fact the source of those grey beads used in traditional beading.

Intellectually, I was aware that they are seeds and come from some plant but I've not seen them in situ as it were.

I've gathered some up and may use them, although beading is not my current focus, sometimes we are given things to work with by accident. Or perhaps it's by design we can't see yet.

Bling is ok

I found this picture on instagram. For me it highlights the banal schism which has plauged the art jewellery, contemporary jewellery scene since the Modernist movement.

In an effort to be recognised as more than mere craft, contemporary jewellery has pushed traditional jewellery ideologies away. Unfortunately, this has also led to a loss of technical skills as well as the making of the type of jewellery which needs inverted commas to talk about.

There is value in this swing, however, new techniques have been discovered, new materials are now commonly used. New sites on the body have become accepted.
Somewhere in this large group of extremists, artists, traditionalists and even commercialists, there lies the core of craft which all of us who make small things of beauty are bound to.

So, my response to this statement is: Excellent, can we get on with making good jewellery now.

Beauty quote

Magic rings

One of the uses of jewellery is as a talisman or religious symbol. This poster reminded me of that, although I would say this fits in the charlatan category.

Often we get clients who have a particular stone, generally a yellow sapphire or a ruby which must sit low in the setting so it touches their skin.

Something to remember as we make objects is what symbolism they embody and how this will be interpreted by others.

Older work

I was looking at my shaving brush stand and realised that a lot of the things I've made for myself have similarities. This is very useful to look at as I hunt down my personal style.

When totally free from design brief or the need to sell something, I lean towards open fret work coupled with engraving.

This ties in nicely with the designs from decorative ironwork as well as my desire to explore chisel engraving/carving.

Thoughts and feelings around the art deco haircomb

While I was happy that I was able to inlay the silver, I had mixed feeling about the final look. The piece looked fine but the inlay was rough and unrefined. I felt like an amateur which is unusual for me in the metalwork arena.

I have been attracted to the Japanese way of working metal for a long time now but have not dared dive into it yet. The best way I can describe it is 'cold feet' I know that once involved it will consume much of my time and energy. For the practitioners who's work is worth looking at, it has become central to their lives.

So in order to get stuck in I have replaced the word nervous with excited and now I am very excited to give it a go. Fortunately, there is a master in this field who is free with his hard won information and very encouraging to all who contact him with a genuine interest. His name is Ford Hallam and he runs the forum Following the Iron Brush. This is a small example of his work:

The tools are the first step and so I have contacted a bladesmith who lives near me and he will help me with steel selection, heat treatment and grinding the profiles of the chisels.

Lessons learnt from Art Deco Haircomb

At the start of this project I was pretty confidant, I knew the theory behind inlay and I had a great design to try it out on. What I learnt very quickly is knowing the theory and having ok hand skills id not enough to make something spectacular on your first go.

Here are some of the specific issues I encountered

Burrs go blunt really quickly when they're used on titanium and they cannot be resharpened. Burrs are a fixed size and make a fixed size groove. You cannot carve a tapering groove of uniform depth with a ball burr.

Carving using rotary tools is fairly quick but has limitations. As you use a rubber wheel, the diameter changes. As the diameter of the wheel becomes smaller, you have to compensate by moving it from side to side in the concave, resulting in an uneven finish. Rotary tools have a specific contact area and it's easy to grind somewhere you did not mean to while trying to get into the space you are concentrating on.

You have to cut the inlay pieces quite precisely and then file them to match exactly. If it doesn't fit properly then when you hammer the piece down, the top folds over and it can indent the surface of the base material. If the top folds over too much, it has no base to squish into the undercut. Just using a hammer to smack the pieces in is inaccurate so you have to use a punch.

The solution to a lot of these problems is to carve the grooves and undercuts with chisels instead of using burrs. So this becomes my next mission, to make the correct chisels needed for such work. Using a hammer and chisels requires two hands, therefore I will need to prepare a pitch bowl to hold the work for me as well.

Art Deco Haircomb Process

Faced with an Art Deco themed exhibition, I decided to do something which would allow me to try inlay. I thought of a hat pin at first but then found a picture of a hair comb which looked beautiful and which would translate well into the more modern medium of titanium.

I chose to use titanium as it is light which is ideal for something which must stay in the hair. Titanium can also be coloured using heat which would provide the type of contrast to the fine silver inlay I was looking for.

Here is a step by step explanation



design layout and drilled

Most of the piercing done

Piercing complete

Start of the carving, using a carborundum disk

Pattern grooved out and undercut with ball burrs and setters HD burrs

Using masking tape and pencil to transfer the shapes of the voids

One lot in, the next lot cut out and ready inlay

The fine silver piece I cut the small inlays out of

One half done

Completed piece, titanium heat coloured with fine silver inlays

Words to live by

Since I am feeling like a beginner I found this quote from Miyomoto Musashi

Chisels and punches

The type of decorative carving and inlay I would like to do requires different tools to normal goldsmithing. The most comprehensive information I have found about these is on the forum called following the iron brush, a forum mostly on Japanese style carving, inlay and metalwork.

It stands to reason that these chisels and punches can be used to make not just Japanese style work but can be used to make western styled ornamentation as well.

This picture is a 'starter pack' of chisel and punch profiles. I will be making some or all of these from a truck suspension leaf spring.

Decorative Arts

Jewellery falls into the category of Applied Arts, under a broad definition such as this:

The term "applied art" refers to the application (and resulting product) of artistic design to utilitarian objects in everyday use. Whereas works of fine art have no function other than providing aesthetic or intellectual stimulation to the viewer, works of applied art are usually functional objects which have been "prettified" or creatively designed with both aesthetics and function in mind. Applied art embraces a huge range of products and items, from a teapot or chair, to the walls and roof of a railway station or concert hall, a fountain pen or computer mouse.

Found here

Except that jewellery does not perform a function per se. Unless it is designed to do something other than adorn the body, it is not strictly speaking functional. An example of functional jewellery would be this bubble blower by Clare English.


So we sit somewhere between fine art and applied art in various forms. Commerce complicates issues as well, where the commercialising of jewellery means a vast number of pieces are not considered any form of art.

Feeling a little depressed at being a 'decorator of something functional' I gave that definition some thought and reached a bit of a revelation. Some of the oldest known artifacts bear signs of decoration. Even Neanderthal man decorated objects, wore shells and painted objects and themselves with red ochre. Somehow creating a functional object is not enough, something within us craves visual pleasure. Once a spear thrower, clay pot, club, blanket, belt or any such object is made, people have spent even longer making that object beautiful than it took to make it functional.

This thought process has given me new vigour to pursue my course of action. Decoration sounds trivial and yet it speaks to something in our very make up. The satisfaction of creating something more beautiful than it needs to be is a worthwhile pursuit.

Applied art, contemporary jewellery, fine art???

I am looking into where my jewellery falls in terms of being defined within specific feilds or genre's within the art sphere.

The definitions of each outlook have to be examined in order for me to choose how to channel my thoughts and energies. This is something I haven't consciously raised with myself before which is remiss of me.

Mostly I like to make things and let others see it as they will. However, since I'm writing about my own work, it makes sense to give myself as well as my audience a theoretical framework.

I have much more reading to do before I can make a useful contribution to this internal debate but this is where my thoughts are headed.

I have forged a mild steel bangle which I plan to carve and inlay. I will use fine silver for the inlay and then use gun blueing techniques on the steel.

The blue is produced using a special liquid and heat to produce an oxide layer which looks great and stops rust from forming. I will look into older blueing techniques in the future. I have read an article that described how the same blue was achieved in medieval times through the use of oil and carbon dust and careful temperature control. I haven't been able to find the specifics though.

Both at work and in my btech I seem to be steered towards stylised floral motifs which I will use on this piece. I am investigating the cherry blossom as a motif, it has great symbolic references in the Japanese martial culture which is something I am interested in.

Gold and Steel, new perspectives

I have been wrestling with the focus of my research for some time now. There are many things I would like to make which do not quite fit into my fairly specific subject of decorative ironwork. Also, the silver work I've done so far has left me fairly uninspired.

I was working with a fairly sizes piece of 18ct yellow gold yesterday and realised that I really love gold. It's not easily explained except to say I have an affinity with the metal, I know how it behaves, I have been bending it to my will for about fifteen years now. I also know that I love steel, my interest in knives and steel structures started before I can remember.

This got me thinking that actually, gold and steel have been used together for centuries. Fascinating techniques such as inlay, overlay, fusing, electroplating and amalgam gilding have been used to bring these two metals together. I will shift the focus of my research towards using gold and steel.

One of the themes of my work has also been looking at relationships, expressed by snatches of poetry or song lyrics. The relationship between iron and gold then becomes a metaphor for these human interactions.

Display progress juliette balcony

Display progress staircase

Display progress cala lilies