Kat’s Arts Blog

It’s the season for winter solstice holidays, and I’m trying to get ready. My family celebrates Christmas by as many of us as possible gathering at or near my parents’ house, which for us means travel time. Since I am making many presents, I have to get busy early. Here’s what my work table looks like now:

This year I am concentrating on jewelry gifts again. For the past several years the female members of our family have received what I hope are ever-increasingly skilled output from my hands. I cringe when I think of some of the newbie stuff I’ve inflicted on them, but everyone has been very gracious and tolerant so far. Maybe this year I can make up for it.

As I go, I’m adding a few pictures of the new things to the gallery, so be sure to visit there once in awhile to see what’s in the works.

We will be leaving for our visitation in a day or two, so if I don’t update this blog until then, have a very merry Christmas!

Since we’ve moved to Texas, albeit in a preliminary way, living in our RV while waiting to build our house, I’ve started settling in to the neighborhood. One of the best things that has happened so far is I discovered an online group of jewelry makers who get together monthly for workshops and socializing. Called the San Marcos Faux Bead Society, this group includes some very talented and sociable people who generously share their expertise and friendship. The “faux” part of the name doesn’t refer to beads, but to the idea of a formal society. It really isn’t a club or anything like that with an organizational structure, just an informal gathering of like-minded people.

At the November 2010 get-together, Dr. Karen Meador walked us through the creation of a cuff bracelet, and decorating it with beads. Here’s mine, using some unakite beads I got in Tucson a couple of years ago:

Click the image to go to the gallery, where more of my jewelry is shown. This was my first attempt at wiring beads to another object, and I could have done a better job of tightening up the oval focal bead, but as a prototype it turned out pretty well. I will be trying more of these on my own soon, since Karen gave us a formula for calculating the length of wire and bending points to use.

An especially appealing aspect of the way Karen had us make our bracelets is that she had visited a local recycling center and obtained a bunch of heavy (10 gauge) wire for us to use as the primary material in this piece, and had pretreated it to add a dark patina. Even after bending and hammering the wire into shape, it retained some of the coating, which added even more depth to the finished items.

I’ve just updated the gallery here with a couple of images of my latest copper jewelry creations. (Click the image below to see the whole gallery.) I finally fired up the new flex-shaft tool to cut the jumpring coils made with the Pepe Jumpring Maker described in an earlier posting, and everything worked just fine. Not only did I have no problems with the flex-shaft tool (in spite of its being a cheap knock-off of the Foredom product pros recommend), I think it may be possible to use the foot pedal controller that came with it to control my Dremel 395, since it works inline between the tool and the wall socket. The final verdict will have to await further testing, but I can’t see any reason for it not to work.

Meanwhile, enjoy the new pics. They’re in the album called “Beaded Jewelry” under “Copper” even though they aren’t actually beaded. They are pure copper, though, and today I restocked my wire stash with a trip to the hardware store, so expect to see lots of copper things in the future, especially if it is made from jumprings.

Lately I’ve been collecting images from around the Web in an electronic journal to help nail down the plans for our house-to-be. One place I’ve found lots of good ones is a site called Houzz, which I found via their (free) iPad app, which of course I installed on mine.

Here’s a neat idea from Houzz:

Reusing old apple crates not only looks nifty, it keeps them out of landfills, so it goes along with the concept of “green building” we’re aspiring to, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Stained, painted or whitewashed they would look even better, but in some settings the “raw” version would fit just fine.

I just read a very disturbing blog post about a situation in classes at a craft show I had considered attending at some point. Follow the link to see the details, but in essence a knowledgable, responsible craftswoman was dissed by show management and city officials for trying to encourage them to correct an unsafe condition caused by firing PMC kilns in classrooms full of students. I certainly will not be going to that show to learn how to use metal clay!

One of the design requirements for our proposed workshop in our new house has always been to have adequate ventilation and a place to operate a kiln away from combustibles, and even with strong vent fans I’ve thought it might be best to use my kiln (which I don’t have yet) outdoors in the courtyard instead of in the shop. It’s very sad that people who are supposed to be leaders in this field, and professionals, can be so cavalier about what ought to be common sense safety precautions, especially when they are purporting to teach work procedures to paying students. How many of those students go home to follow similar bad practices because “the teachers said it was ok”?

Building a new house presents many opportunities. We are looking forward to a space that is designed just for us, with areas for all our projects and lifestyle. We are also thinking about how to make our new home “low impact” on the environment. Choosing materials and construction methods and designs that take into consideration ways to avoid wasteful practices is one of our goals.

So, what kinds of resources are we aiming to conserve? First of all, water. Even though here in central Texas last week we had altogether too much water, that flood followed several years of drought. And according to the Texas A&M Agricultural Extension, “In urban areas of Texas about 25 percent of the water supply is used for landscape and garden watering.” So, one focus needs to be on how to design the landscape of our yard to conserve water, using xeriscape methods. (Xeri- means “dry” but modern xeriscaping is not all cactus and rock. More on this later.) Since we will be buying new appliances, we can shop for some that use less water than others. Right away we are thinking of getting a dish drawer from Fisher & Paykel, like we have in the RV, since we know from experience it is low-water and low-noise but very efficient.

The clothes washer is another potential water-hog. The little (half-sized) Italian 110v. model we have in the RV seems to use a lot of water, even though it doesn’t use much electricity. It also takes forever to dry because of the low wattage. So, I have some research to do there.

But before we pick out appliances, we need to decide what kinds of building materials to use. We have looked at ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) construction, using forms created from recycled polystyrene, and some that don’t use polystyrene. Then there are more traditional blocks, or frame, or… Obviously, more research is needed, on these subjects and more. To keep up with what we’re discovering, be sure to visit often. I’ve love to hear about your experiences and ideas, too!

In my last post I mentioned that Phil and I are planning to build a house soon. Naturally, as an inveterate blogger, I plan to write about the process, but aside from one entry on my techie blog that mainly discusses how I generated a presentation of our plan, I have not yet started to discuss it online. For one thing, I have had a hard time deciding which of my blogs would be a suitable venue for such content, or maybe should I start yet another one? That would be really excessive since I can’t keep up with the four active blogs I have now. And since architecture and decorating are after all arts, I decided to write about it here.

The things I plan to write about include the house, workshop and garage design, including the xeriscape landscaping we have in mind, the “green” building techniques and materials we are considering, and everything else that goes into planning a new home. In case you haven’t been following my comments on Twitter about it, I should mention that the home site is in the Texas Hill Country, near Canyon Lake. In light of the flash flood here last week, one of the design decisions to cover might well be how to plan to prevent damage from similar events in the future. And while floods and xeriscape design might seem contradictory, they really aren’t. Both semi-arid and disasterously wet conditions are possibilities here at various times, so they have to be taken into consideration.

I won’t be neglecting the other “arts” included in this website. For one thing, there are already photos of our building site in the gallery’s landscape section here, and as for jewelry design, that has to be done somewhere. Designing a really practical workshop with areas for various craft techniques is certainly one of the aspects of this whole enterprise that has me excited.

Along with expanding the scope of this blog, I’m adding another element to the website: ads. I’m working on a policy statement about them that will become a permanent page on the site, but don’t be too surprised to see ads for a lot of home decor products, and possibly more. They do not constitute paid endorsements — I should be so lucky! But it is possible that we may use some of the products advertised here and if we do, I may write about them. When that happens, I will be sure to follow the FTC’s recent directive to inform you, my reader, about whatever commercial relationship exists between me and my advertisers, so you can judge for yourself whether I can be objective or not. While I think it highly unlikely any vendor will be willing to pay me enough to actually affect my judgement or comments, if you know about what’s going on you can make up your own mind. At this point, I feel like I ought to use the phrase “fair and balanced” …. Sorry, this isn’t a political blog. I just got carried away.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the addition. Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions anytime.

In my last posting, I complained about not being able to use my Dremel rotary tool and flex shaft with the Pepe 307 Jump Ring Maker. In all fairness to Pepe Tools, I should say that they do specify the Foredom H.30 flex shaft tool handle, and don’t promise to be compatible with Dremel tools.

So, I went back to the webstore where I bought the Jump Ring Maker, Contenti, and found that they carry what they call an “Economy Flexshaft” that includes motor, foot control, flex shaft and Foredom H.30 knock-off handle, all for US$84, instead of the US$243 pricetag for an equivalent Foredom set from Amazon. Now, this is an el-cheapo Chinese kit, not for heavy-duty use, and Contenti says so, but I’m not going to use it heavily, so I ordered it. They have a 90 day warranty, so if it is really that bad I’ll send it back, bite the bullet and get the Foredom.

Boy, am I unhappy! Not long ago I bought a tool set I’d been drooling over for months, the Pepe 307 Jump Ring Maker, for jewelry projects. It looks like a really nifty collection of well-made, well-designed components, but I have a problem with it. Instead of being able to use my existing Dremel rotary tool and flex shaft with it (to saw apart the wire coils wound on the mandrels to make them into jump rings), it appears I will have to buy a whole new rotary tool, from Foredom.

It isn’t that the Dremel is incapable of cutting the rings. Actually, my Dremel 395 at 8,000-35,000 RPM is more powerful than the Foredom, which only goes up to 18,000 RPM. The problem is that Dremel’s flex shaft handle is just a smidgen too large to fit into the saw guard, and the drive shaft on the included saw blade holder is just 1/32-inch too big to fit into Dremel’s MultiPro chuck. Also, the Dremel flex tool handle is tapered at both ends, while the saw guard is designed for a completely cylindrical handle (like Foredom’s h.30).

I don’t see any solution other than investing in yet another tool. I don’t want to get rid of the Dremel, since it does a lot more than just drive a bench-top mini-saw, and I have bajillions of accessories for it. I suppose most of the bits and polishing/sanding/cutting wheels, etc. for the Dremel will work with the Foredom as well as the Dremel, but the Foredom isn’t portable like the Dremel, and I have other Dremel accessories like the drill press stand and router table, which won’t accept the Foredom. But I really want to get full use of the Pepe Jump Ring Maker, too. Sigh! It’s a good thing we are planning to have a large workshop in the new house we’re building!

It’s funny how one thing leads to another…

I was just browsing one of the email lists I subscribe to when I came across a mention of a Ning network I hadn’t previously found, Copper Wire Jewelers Magazine. The site founder, Lois Linquist, is also the founder/editor/publisher of the eponymous electronic magazine. Since I enjoy using copper in my jewelry-making, and also have a long-standing interest in electronic publishing, this was a perfect fit. The magazine is published through a site called Issuu – You Publish. If you are interested in either copper jewelry or electronic publishing, you’ll enjoy these links.