Jewelry Making 101

At the end of last year, I purchased an introductory class to making jewelry for Tricia on her birthday.  She’s mentioned it in the past.  She's even declared it as one of her dreams to do.  I thought it'd make a great gift.  I booked months in advance knowing how arts and craft events get booked so quickly especially here in the bay.  As part of her secondary gift, I purchased myself a class ticket to accompany her so I be in the moment and witness her live out a life-long dream.  Little did I know just how much I would fall in love with the art myself.

A random moment of reflection enters.  It never ceases to surprise me how good it feels to have something booked in advance ahead of time.  The longer you have to wait, the longer the excitement, anticipation, and ultimately pleasure gets accrued.  A long time ago, I remembered hearing a friend speak very vividly.  I heard him broach the subject of something potentially crude and crass at the surface level, yet inevitably wise and applicable to all aspects of life.  “If you’re gettin’ down with a girl and you’re about to blow, why wouldn’t you pull back, stop, and wait?”, stated bluntly without any shame, doubt, or uncertainty.  The meaning behind it is simple.  The point was to say, if something feels so incredibly good, don’t let it end so quickly.  We’d be doing ourselves an incredible disservice otherwise.  Instead, prolong it.  Enjoy the ride.  Don’t alleviate the discomfort so quickly to relieve the pressure.  Know the difference between good discomfort versus bad.  The pleasure at final destination is never as good or long-lasting as the moments building up to the apex.  This would prove to be another important life lesson told through the unexpected.  It’s a lesson I still hold to this day deep within me.  The journey is the destination.

The Introduction to Jewelry & Metals class took place this past weekend.  Tricia and I committed total 16 hours over the span of two days inside a warehouse, which felt like a second home for Burners.  The place called The Crucible is located just over the bridge in West Oakland.  It’ll go without saying, but this place is beyond amazing.  Woodworking, blacksmithing, moldmaking, enameling, glassblowing, ceramics, and the list goes on.  They even have a bike shop offering classes build your own bicycle from scratch.  Bike frame, wheels, spokes, chain, seat post, the whole nine yards.  Imagine riding around town.  Someone specs out your ride and asks you where you purchased it.  You respond back, telling them you built the beautiful thing with your bare hands from scratch.  Priceless.

Being inside The Crucible for 8 hours is like being outdoors for 8 hours.  The entrance way is through a giant warehouse-sized garage door, always left open to the public and large enough probably to lug 30 ft steel monster sculptures to and from the place.  There hardly exists anything equivalent to a standard door entrance other than to various workshops littered within the place.  Even still, those doors were always left open.  Point is, if it’s cold outside, then it’s cold inside.  It was really cold and brisk when we went.  It was really cold and brisk inside for 8 hours.

There was a choice to elect a class meeting up once a week for 3 hours for over a month versus a weekend intensive course meeting for 8 hours on both Saturday and Sunday.  Without a doubt, I chose the latter knowing how we both loving charging forward to new adventures with full-force.

Saturday, we had our heads pumped with basic fundamentals.  This included techniques like annealing, sawing, texturizing, filing, and my personal favorite, soldering.  We practiced creating a large variety of textures onto metals using a wide assortment of hammers and punchers.  We created fishnet and snakeskin textures onto copper using a rolling mill.  We learned how to solder butt joints, t-joints, and sweat joints.  We learned about flux and how it protects our metals when heating it up using a torch.  We learned how to detect metal as being properly annealed and how to clean the metal off with an acid bath immediately afterward.  It’s quite a lot to take in on one day, and I was completely wiped out by the end.  To be honest, I was slightly discomforted by the thought of coming back the next day for yet another grueling 8 hours.

Sunday rolled in.  Everyone had a task the night before to come in with a few designs for rings.  The idea was to spend all of Sunday to make them.  Tricia and I arrive late.  We had no designs.  We just had ourselves.  I remember my brain feeling fried.  I remember feeling tired, drained, and weak.  I haven’t slept much the previous week or nights leading up to the class.  I was feeling low and filled with an empty feeling.  Work motivation was up, but I was starting to feel the onslaught of apathy creeping in.  I was fighting my depression once again and was hard on myself for not being more excited about the opportunity at hand.

I sat down.  I isolated into myself and my thoughts.  Designs started popping up out of what seemed like nowhere.  I’d see a line there, a few holes there, a pattern there, words scribed across the middle.  I took a look at some sample rings to help brainstorm.  I saw a silver ring with a piece of brass and copper soldered onto it.  I relished in the idea of juxtaposing small pieces of copper against the silver band.  I thought about uniformity.  I thought about order.  I thought about patterns.  In the past, my designs frequently revolved around lines of symmetry and intricate repeating patterns.  I was conjuring up patterns in my head in addition to subtle but hidden words proving to be particularly special to me and potentially others.  I started thikning about the words perfect and imperfection.  I suppose it’s how I felt most in the moment.

We each received a sliver of silver and had the option of making two rings out of it instead of one.  I was determined to do just that.  I sawed the silver piece in half, then measured and sawed two thirds off the width.  The wider piece was my primary focus while the skinny piece served as my backup and stretch goal.  My motivation earlier was simply one ring, but I was now motivated to make something really beautiful and something which would carry lots of sentimental value.  I went from crafting a plain blank piece of silver to one with two lines bordering up the edges.  Between the lines, I cut out and soldered four small circular pieces of copper, all equidistant from each other.  I punched a pattern of small holes surrounding the copper simply because it just felt right.  After this, I couldn’t help but notice the seemingly perfect blank slate left for me to scribe two words along the ring, oriented in opposite directions.  There were the four slots between each copper piece and then the four copper pieces themselves.  Two words popped into my head almost immediately as if they were part of my plan all along.  They were the two most prominent emotions in my current and past life always dominating my very core.

LOVE - PAIN

There is no love without pain.  They go hand-in-hand.  The greater you love someone, the greater the pain you experience through it.

I fit this for the ring finger of my right hand.  Upon closer inspection of my ring, I’m tempted to draw an even grander conclusion from the design.  This isn’t the first time I designed something for myself only to realize much later on an even greater significance and meaning drawn from it.  The letters spelling the word LOVE is surrounded by lots of space.  The space is a metaphor for freedom.  It provides space to move around in, to be open, to be accepting, to be seen and free.  It rests directly on the silver band.  It rests at the core.  On the other hand, the letters spelling PAIN are trapped within the confines of a tiny copper piece.  The copper piece represents a prison.  It’s a holding cell accompanied by four punch holes carefully placed at each corner.  The holes are like watch towers keeping guard, making sure the prisoner, pain, doesn’t escape.

In life, I find this to be just as true.  We prison our pain.  We often hold onto it more often longer than necessary.  Some people choose to hold onto it forever.  For some, there is pain which will never, ever go away.  Love on the other hand shifts in, out, and around freely.  It comes and goes swiftly like the wind.  It dances around.  It sings.  It moves.  It frees.  Love is freeing.

The skinny ring was a pet project and was one I told myself I cared less about.  Looking back in hindsight though, I treated it with just as much care as I did the other.  If there’s another thing to learn through this experience, it’s knowing it’d be almost impossible for me to half-ass any task.  Even when I told myself the skinny ring didn’t matter, it truthfully still did.  It usually does.  I textured the metal by hand using a small wedge hammer, littering the small piece of silver with textures moving in every direction.  I stamped the letters i-m-p-ǝ-r-f-ǝ-ɔ-t along the band, making sure to flip a few letters upside down to highlight its imperfection.  Each letter was appropriately padded with an even amount of space on each side while its vertical orientation was all mixed.  I wanted this ring to be imperfect, even though I had to strive for perfection while making it.  I wanted this ring to remind me I am imperfect, to continue being imperfect, and to continue striving for imperfection.

I cannot describe the level of joy I have in my heart to be wearing rings I actually crafted.  Everything from the thickness gauge, to the design, to the words, to the meaning.  It’s all my own, and there isn’t a single piece of jewelry at the moment which can mean more to me.

Thank you Tricia.