The difference between my cast hydrangeas and my hand made ones

My cast hydrangeas ( that i cast in march) show the veins in the flower well in silver. I had to find a way of creating these veins in the silves. so i took a sharp skelpel blade and started off with that. It turned out that the back of the hydrangea looked more beautiful than the front as the veins stuck out at the back and were imprinted in the front. The cast hydrangeas. I am still going to try electroplating the hydrangea flower.

Hand made hydrangea, the back of it where the veins stick out.

My reference

A hydrangea neck piece in the making

NSA jewellery on show

Tomorrow we exhibit our jewellery in 2 big show cases at the NSA art Gallery . After a very long discussion at tech on thursday morning about how 10 of us B tech students would show our work together and somehow get each student who is desiginning their own jewellery to look good as a whole, I have decided to use white perspex and to put my work on that. I will have to see how it intigrates with every one else's displays tomorrow.

I created some of my hydrangea range for this exhibition: (thumb nail size for now)

NSA exhibition

My neck piece is in the making but not in the soldering stage! There are so many options I could go with! I am going to have to speed production up in order to keep my designs turning into a jewellery state
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New ideas

Simple idea but I have not tried it yet. I want to create a lot of different shanks that will have from 1 to very many hydrangeas on them. I better get cracking!
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Using different parts of flowers

I was watching a video by Nora Fok on Michelle pujols blog and found it fascinating how Nora creates this amazing neck piece/ work of art by using a protea that she takes seeds out of the protea from the inside and creates this amazing piece using these seeds.

I think I need to start taking detailed bits of flowers and different aspects of a flower how Nora has done instead of taking the flower as a whole and recreating it or something that looks like it. here is the link to see what i am talking about ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKGpsY8dNdQ&feature=player_embedded or http://michellepujol.blogspot.com/

The flowers on the walk way near moses Mabida

I thought these flowers on the tiles of the walkway were great! They are found under the bridge when you walk from the stadium to the beach. A "long term" goal ( I am too busy with my hydrangeas at the moment) is too incorporate a truly south African flower into my jewellery! I'm keeping these ideas in my journal!
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Starting my hydrangea neck piece for NSA exhibition!

I have started creating my hydrangea flowers by hand and am going to be creating a few pieces of hydrangea jewellery for the NSA exhibition!
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Beautiful work done by the goldensmith

I absolutely love the goldensmith's blog and work. His piece of jewellery called silver dust fusion just shows that plants don't have to be cast inorder to make them look more realistic in silver, they can look even better if made by your hands. look this link to see whati am talking about http://thegoldensmith.blogspot.com/2010/05/silver-dust-fusion.html

Sand casting

We had a sand casting workshop at tech. I thought it would be a good idea to try cast an organic article. When I was cooking at my sisters house I came across some beautiful looking anni seeds which had a funny type of smell almost a liquorice smell. I thought I would try it out. Here is a bit of the process.

Above: A fire is beign made with coal, wood and paper to create a hot enough flame to melt the metal, which is in the crucibal, which is in the flames. the funny looking machine (top photo in the middle of the photo) blows oxygen into the fire which creates a hotter flame. The machine only blows air onto the fire when its handle is being turned.

Below are the the seeds I found to sand cast

Pressing the seed into the sand to make a mold. There were a few undercuts on the seed that caused a bit of the sand to move when it was being lifted out.

After the seed has been cast. It came out nicely in its own way but was not a perfect casting. The seed is a bit complecated in terms of its form to be able to cast perfectly.

My vetkat jewellery on display!

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My finished Vet Kat jewellery

Vet Kat castings

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Green theme

We have had a vet kat exhibition where we were to design jewellery around the drawings of the bushmen vet kat. I used one of his flowers and created my own vet kat flowers out of bees wax which i then cast. These pieces I used for my green theme as I was busy with this chapter when we were given news about this exhibition. A bit of my process is above...

Green project

Im back! I have not been gone, I have been working in my journal!
So what I have been working on for the last 2 months is lots of different bits and pieces but I have decided I need to pick an area to work with and stick to it for a while! Just so turns out that what I was doing for my fashion chapter ties into my green theme completely. I am going to use flowers in my jewellery like i have been to create awareness of the environment.