RAW 07/52 - Vow Ring

Just realized I never updated the bog with my more recent RAW submissions.

RAW ring #7 is a wedding ring with vow that reads: WITH THIS RING I SEAL MY VOW OF LOVE TO YOU.

The text is extruded and flowed around the ring opening. I have to figure out how I can squeeze the letters together so they overlap and would not need the ring bar to hold them together. Thats another week's assignment.

I am curious to see how the texture at the band top will look when printed in 3D and if the text is still readable when printed.

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Rainy Weekends

It's Sunday night and I can't believe I have to go to work tomorrow again. Weekends are always too short, even with having the Friday off. I am still trying to work only 4 days at the office, but it does not work out this way all the time.  I don't know why some people love to schedule meetings on Fridays... At least this time I pulled it off and had my 3 day "creation" weekend.

I needed it. Esty is keeping me busy and with the Spring Artful Home catalog out now, there were also some orders for the featured "Aquarius" ring.

Seems the catalog exposure really brings in sales. Since it looks like they want to put the ring in the next catalog too, I need to order more of those aquamarines. Wish they would choose another of my designs with stones that are easier to be sourced. I have such a hard time finding nice oval aquamarine cabs in the size I need. Luckily next weekend happens to be the International Jewelry and Gem show in the LA Convention Center. Already checked with my new supplier for these stones and he confirmed to bring a batch of those gems for me. Hope I don't overspend on other pretty little treasures again. I "hate" going to these shows. It's so tempting. Too many pretty precious things to admire and trade for credit card information. Some girls spend all their money on shoes, I spend it on gems.

Normally I try to do the wax work for the weekly orders all on Friday to be able to do a Saturday cast. But I switched it this week to get a head start on finishing last weekends castings and get a few rings out of the door. I also needed to go to downtown LA in the morning to get some more silver for all these new orders. Almost fainted when I saw the bill for the sterling silver casting grain. It's now over 40$ per toz, crazy! After  finishing some rings, I ended up starting on the wax work at 8pm. This meant having to put in a long night with vacuuming the investment for 6 rings at 2am. And then the rain started.

I realized I really should have checked the weather report before scheduling my casting for Sunday. It was poring cats and dogs all day! Living in LA, I almost forget that it does occasionally rain here. And when it does, it rains hard. My dog Lena did not get out of her bed all day long. She snuggled up in the pillows the entire day and only got up for food and the occasional look out of her doggy door. Wish I could do that too, the pillow part. I miss spending rainy Sundays in bed.

With the rain, every time I checked the temperature outside on the kiln, I got drenched. For better fume ventilation the kiln is outside under a little roof overhang where it does not get direct rain on it. But the overhang is not wide enough to protect me too. Fortunately the kiln electronics did not get affected by the humidity and it finished the 6 hour burn out cycle without problems and one wet caster. Now I have a few castings to finish over the week before next weeks new batch.

RAW 06/52

Good news was that Rhino came out some weeks ago with a free beta version 5 for OSX MAC and I had to give it a try. Since I am a total beginner anyways I can't really say  if it works any better or not. But it's nice not having to work on the window's version via Parallels.

This weeks ring was a spin off from the open strip ring I did  in RAW 03 to 05. It's a bit higher version and more sculptural. Since there are no plugins (T-spline etc) yet for the new beta version I just modeled it completely in Rhino. It actually was not to hard to model. I haven't tried to 3d print any of my rings yet. I am curious if some of those edges are to thin to be printed. I guess I will see when I get there.

The only problem I really had with the Beta version for MAC was that the render function seemed to crash the program. Therefor I only have a screen shot pictures.

Now I am only 3 weeks behind with my challenge. I guess I have to find some time this weekend and model rings instead of doing my taxes. It's more fun anyways.
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RAW 03, 04 and 05/52 Rings

I am so behind already in my RAW challenge and that only after  a few weeks since it started. I haven't found much time to play around with 3d modeling lately. January an February were pretty busy (which is a good thing). I struggled keeping up with orders and all those "millions" of rings I cast with my new casting setup. So much fun to do the casting again. But as a result I have a stack of raw cast rings on my bench that need to be filed, polished and stones set. Unfortunately my challenge for RAW is about learning the software and therefor I can't use those cast rings as my RAW entries.

I did play around with some simple anticlastic strip shapes in Rhino. Originally those were just options with some deformations for the same idea and should be counted as only one weeks challenge entry. But I decided now to count each option as a ring and get up on my schedule again. The deformed shaped originated from the simple strip on the left. I just moved pointed around to widen certain parts and give them a more dynamic feel.

Overall I still struggle alot with getting a feel for the software. It just does not feel as natural to me as modeling wax by hand feels. But I hope over time I get more used to it and really develop new possibilities for my ring designs by using 3d software.
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