ruby

I love making these tiny boxes, this one is about two centimeters across. As usual, the tiny jewel rotates out to catch the light.

lost

I love this fragment, it went inside the lid of The Egypt Box (one of the story boxes I made a while back).

clock beetle

I'm letting this piece sit for a while until I figure out where to go with it. I spent much of today drilling tiny, tiny holes in wire which I will rivet tomorrow, also experimenting with odd-shaped rivets of various materials.
Last Saturday was a day of coincidental meetings. At the show (which was in another city) I ran into the lovely woman who was my neighbour for the last seven years until she bought a house this summer. Later, at dinner in a Peruvian restaurant, it turned out that the woman sitting next to me had been in the same Chinese (language) school that I was in, for the same three years, but we had never met before this. Two friends on my left told us they ran into each other on a sidewalk in New York last month, neither knew the other was planning to be there.

pearls

Pearls are so beautiful and strange, the way they reflect light is fantastic.

This is the last thing I finished today, then I went to dinner with friends and met the wool-pusher’s father, who is visiting from England. Miss P herself is easy-going and endlessly generous, with an incredible array of talents ranging from dancing and fiber-art through managing singers and teaching. She and her dad are full of funny stories about their lives, crazy wolfhounds, and adventures all over the world - they are the kind of family you want to be adopted in to, and it was a great ending to a good day.

empty

This sliding compartment will be held shut by a winding pin, tomorrow I’ll build the setting.

p.s. Clearly if this were to be nominated for the ‘Most Boring Post of 2008′ award the competition would slink away knowing they had no chance. And a thumbnail photo, really! I owe a thousand apologies.

heavy

The retreat is over and I’m here to testify that luggage filled with tools is heavy. Very heavy. But the steel bench vise did come in handy! The retreat was fantastic, being with other artists is energizing, but I have a hard time creating around other people, so I didn’t have to worry about carefully packing up a lot of delicate finished pieces for the trip back. Just heavy tools. Did I mention the bench vise includes an anvil?

The box in the photo is a simple one, I love the face. I’m trying to find more of these vintage white tins, they are by far my favourites.

In my eternal search for tools I have not been able to find anyone locally who carries a riveting hammer that is steel and has a round head, so I’m off to order one on-line because my next projects involve a lot of riveting.

jewel

Almost done, I just need to shut the lid of the inner box and wire the capsule into that empty cavity.

in situ

This is where the box-inside-the-box-on-top-of-the-box sits, it is removable. I’ve changed around the scarab on the top since the last photo was taken, and as soon as I put the map inside the lid of the box-on-top-of-the-box, recopy the hieroglyphs and demotic on to some antique paper (regretfully, not papyrus), roll that up and put it in the capsule, and affix the wire to hold the capsule in its place it will be done.

Then a good-bye photo, and off to its new home.

component

This is one of the inner parts for the top of this box - I love the light coming through the jewel, so I’m not going to put in the portrait that was going to be on the bottom of the lid. There will be several items in the ’secret’ compartment, including a map and a message written in demotic script.

I may have over-thought this (as usual).

wear

I love the patina on old materials, and the strength of something that has been around for many decades or more than a century. Some pieces are so beautiful, they must have been someone’s valued possession. I’m glad they weren’t tossed in the trash when an old dresser drawer was cleared out, especially since I search for small, already broken things - usually the first to go into the bin.

change of focus

Building is such a different mindset than locating materials, sometimes at first it is hard to not to wander off and explore yet another possible source of more parts. ( I am grateful that there are people who are willing to package up fiddly little broken bits and put the word out instead of throwing them in the trash - I hate breaking things, especially if they are old, and I need material to build with.) After resisting the urge to hunt and gather, it’s easy to go too far the other direction and find myself trying to build a tiny steam engine when I don’t actually need to power anything, it just needs to look like it’s possible. Finally, after cruising back and forth picking up, fitting together, rejecting parts and picking up others, I’ll have the pieces I think I need. A bit of a wrestle, trying to make them work in a way they were not engineered to do, then rivets and glue hold everything together. The next day I face the mass of boxes and trays and wonder how I ever got an idea for the last project.

The photo is one of the pack of dogs who keeps me company and reminds me to take long walks, this was the picture the shelter took when her previous owner turned her in. After a month of not eating the pound’s dog food she looked even worse, but nine months later she’s the pretty girl of the bunch. I’ll post a current photo later.