Island of Misfit Tools

Metalsmiths need lots of tools.  Many of the tools are obvious -- blowtorch, files -- but the longer you're a metalsmith, the more you start misappropriating tools.  You find tools that really are for other purposes but fit what you need exactly.  For example, a goldsmith acquaintance of mine is a dentist.  She recently spent an hour showing some fellow metalsmiths tools that she's ordered from her dental catalogs for metalsmithing purposes.  There are some fantastic things in those dental catalogs, and I'm not just talking about that gizmo that wrenches your mouth open.  I'm not thinking about getting that thing to use on my daughter.  Not at all.

Sanding pads, aka thin sanding sponges.

Here's my favorite misappropriated tool: the sanding pad.  It's actually for woodworkers.  It's to help them easily sand rounded items like table legs and artisan billy clubs.  But it also works beautifully on jewelry.  The thin sponge attached to the back of the sanding pad is so flexible and easy to hold, unlike sandpaper.  It's pretty good at getting into corners and smallish spaces.  Also unlike sandpaper, it's very durable.  You can even wash it clean of metal dust and use it again.

I decided to look up what made sanding pads so awesome, and it's the aluminum oxide abrasive blah blah snore.  I have to admit -- I don't really care what makes them so hardy and flexible.  It's kind of like Magic Eraser: I'm sure there's something in that thing that's going to give me brain cancer, but it gets unwashable marker off of walls!  Woot!  As long as it's working for me, I'm happy.

Here are some other members of my Island of Misfit Tools: 

My blowtorch: Just add a torch head and you're
in business.  It ain't graceful, but it
gets the job done.

1) My blowtorch.  Professional metalsmiths have these fancy torches with tanks that mix acetylene and oxygen, or little hand butane torches for detail work.  Me, I have a 14 oz. Worthington propane cylinder that you can waltz into any ol' hardware store and get.  Add an off-the-rack nozzle/torch head and you're in business for $19 instead of $600.

2) A wooden kitchen spoon.  If you want to make your own metal links and jump rings (those little metal circles that hold everything together), you can get jump ring makers to enable you to make uniform rings.  And I have several jump ring makers.  But the jump ring maker that creates my favorite size and shape is the handle of a wooden spoon I found.

3) A pushpin.  Just your average little pushpin (mine has a red plastic top, so I can see it easily if it falls on the floor).  I drill holes in metal a lot.  But it's hard to drill a hole without the drill skittering all over the metal.  When you're driving nails, that's what a nail punch is for -- to help position the nail before you start hammering.  But nail punches leave too big a mark for many tiny pieces of jewelry.  So I just use a pushpin, hammering lightly on its flat top to leave a tiny indentation in the metal.

I'll show more tools I use on here in the future.  Feel free to misappropriate anything I mention for your own needs!  For example: Wooden spoons are also great for beating children, decorative crafts, poking at dead things in your yard, and to help you fish things out from under the couch.  I understand some people also use them for cooking, but I have never actually seen this happen.    

Where I create

My neighbor asked me recently if I made my jewelry in the garage.  It makes sense for metalsmithing, but the garage is not weather-perfect.  We live in Virginia -- it's too cold out there in the winter and too muggy in the summer.  So where do I work?  There is a very nice built-in desk in our office.  It has some shelves, several drawers, overhead lighting, an outlet and a small closet next to it.  It would be an ideal studio space.  Except it's not.

The built-in desk in all of its horror.  Metalsmithing books
on the left, packaging and craft show items on the floor,
boxes and bags of non-jewelry supplies on the desk.

 

The desk wasn't supported in the middle and therefore is a bit bowed.  Things roll to the middle when set on top of the desk.  I need that to be fixed.  And I'd like the drawers to be arranged more conveniently for heavy outlet use.

So we're going to rebuild the desk a little and create the perfect studio space for me.  Someday.  First I have to clean all the crap off the desk.  I set things there when we moved in three years ago and they've never found a home.  (The curse of the crafter:  Too many supplies.)  I'm not quite ready to be brutally honest about cleaning this area.  In the meantime, the stuff appears to be reproducing, which is only making matters worse.  And I am left with no studio space. 

My trusty work tray in the family room. Papers to
the left are sketches, and to the right of the bowl is my
must-have pile of sanding sponges. Also: I love my red
microfiber couch, but hate that it leaves butt marks.

So for now I work in the kitchen.  It's actually not bad.  The only downside is that I have to clean up every evening so we can make dinner (and so resident 5-year-olds won't get hurt).  Otherwise, there's a nice big window, plenty of lighting, lots of outlets, and I'm right next to the sink (more on the importance of being close to a water source in a future post).  However, that means my tools are all over the kitchen.  I have some stashed in what cupboard space there is, but I'm not motivated to pack too much away.  When you're using these tools several times a week, you want to be able to grab them quickly.   

I occasionally work in the family room, too.  It's where we hang out or watch TV, so I tend to do repetitive work in there -- filing, polishing.  I work on a little antique tray I have.  A family room might not seem like the best place to have work set up, but I have my daughter trained:  Don't touch Mommy's tray or anything on it.  She's so well trained that she recently ratted out my mother.  "Mommy, Grammy's touching your jewelry!  Mommy!  She just touched it AGAIN!"

The tool bucket in the kitchen (and, yes,
the boxes to the right are filled with
supplies).  The bucket is filled with all
my tools that won't maim small kids.

My family is extremely nice about the bucket and boxes next to the kitchen table and tray of tools in the family room.  No one breathes a word about the blowtorch sitting on the counter (disassembled, of course -- I'm not trying to kill anyone making sandwiches in my "studio").  It's possible that my family is enabling me, but I love them for letting me work my own way.  My husband occasionally nags me about using the stovetop as part of my work space, but he knows I'm careful.  And he's sweet enough that, the one time I was distracted and not careful and therefore melted part of my Dremel case, he didn't even tell me, "I told you so."  He just told me to call the Dremel hotline and order another one. 

Someday I will have a beautiful little studio in the office.  I will not have to clean up silver dust just to be able to slice an apple.  I'll be able to leave my tools right on the tabletop and not yell, "Leave the metal where it is!  Make yourself some cheese crackers on the other side of the sink!"  But I won't be able to look out the window at the birds and trees while I work.  I won't have as much space to move around.  So I'll admit I'm not rushing things.  It might freak people out to know I made their ring in my kitchen, but the kitchen's environment helped me make that ring beautiful.  And despite what my neighbor thinks, if you saw our garage, you'd be grateful I settled in the kitchen. 

Repressed artistic tendencies

If I wasn't making jewelry, I'd be a letterpress artist. I know that sounds a little like saying, "If I didn't train lions, I'd train tigers." They're both art, both very detail-oriented. But the processes are not the same at all. Letterpress exercises a different artistic muscle. Flexing it gives me a thrill, a special endorphin rush. I'm happy with where I ended up, but letterpress holds a special place in my heart.

Letterpress is the old method of publishing -- a weighted machine squeezes type against paper when hand-cranked. I first discovered it in college. One of my journalism professors invited us over to his place for an end-of-the-semester celebration, and in his garage he had an old hand-crank letterpress used to publish some newspaper many moons ago. I was enthralled. He liked to crank out little newsletters, but pawing through his type I saw the potential for something that was cool.

Then, several years later, my future husband and I were walking to work in downtown D.C. one day when we were stopped in our tracks by a pop-up gallery at the corner of 14th and G. Some of the art was reminiscent of outsider art, which we love, but it looked like it was woodblock prints. We had discovered Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress, and we (and our bank account) would never be the same.

Our biggest Yee-Haw splurge: The Johnny Cash fine art
print hangs above our fireplace.
Pizza delivery boys covet it.

We now have many, many letterpress artists we love, but I believe Yee-Haw will eventually be on every wall of our house. Some rooms have two or more Yee-Haw prints. My husband gave me a Yee-Haw print as a wedding gift.  We have visited them at their studio in Knoxville, TN, twice. Adam at Yee-Haw made our daughter's birth announcement. I visit the Yee-Haw booth at Merlefest before I even see a show. I took a multi-day letterpress workshop with the founders of Yee-Haw, Kevin Bradley and Julie Belcher. Kevin introduced us to our favorite record store in Knoxville. We know he wears alarming argyle knee-high socks. We obviously have an unhealthy relationship with Yee-Haw.

But sometimes that's how you discover your interests (letterpress, stalking). I figured I could make letterpress art, too. My husband and sister began poking around and found Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, MD. Pyramid Atlantic is an arts center dedicated to papermaking and printmaking. This means they have several presses, including my big babies: two Vandercook presses. Swoon! Presses have their own personalities, and these guys were no different. They flirted with me. I attended a one-night workshop to learn how to use the suckers, and then it suddenly became My Thing. I was home all day every day with a baby and needed a break -- just a little something to get me out and re-establish who I was outside of being a mom. Apparently, who I was was an ink monkey. I was soon going once a week, setting type into designs and printing them. There was a little gang of us who went religiously. We didn't talk too much about life outside that room. I think it was an escape for all of us, not just me.

One of the woodblock prints I carved and pressed
at a workshop with Yee-Haw's founders (an
homage to the 14th Street of my youth).

Letterpress is not easy. It can take hours and hours and therefore days to set the type in the design you want. And it has to be backward.  Or you can carve your design into wood and press that, but that carved design also has to be backward.  If you want two or more colors, you have to make two or more layouts or carvings.  Plus you have to understand how a 100-year-old machine works. Sometimes the Vandercook won't give you good pressure no matter what you do. Sometimes it takes forever to line your type and paper up. Sometimes the ink will not spread into a certain spot no matter how hard you try. It takes quite awhile to clean the press afterward. I loved every minute of it.

But the trip to Pyramid Atlantic was a long one -- almost an hour each way, one way in rush-hour traffic. When we moved even further south, I gave it up. I miss it. I'd love to have a letterpress here at home I could play with. But even if I could afford one, it would mean giving up the garage (big, heavy presses need to sit on a concrete slab). After years of exposing my vehicle (and myself) to the elements, I like having a garage for its intended purposes. I'm not ready to give it up. So I decided it was time to rededicate myself to jewelry. But I think of letterpress often. How can I not, with Yee-Haw in every room? Maybe one day I'll find a little tabletop press for stationary. I can make little cards, silly gift tags, small prints for friends. I've even figured out a way I could marry my love of jewelry and letterpress. I think there's a chance it could happen. It took many years to achieve my metalsmithing dreams, but I did. I don't think I need to give up on letterpress just yet.

What am I worth?

For me, the hardest part of opening a jewelry shop on Etsy was figuring out prices.  You don't have to go it on your own if you don't want to.  There are several crafting-industry formulas for pricing work, but I like this one:

Cost price (materials + labor) x 2 = wholesale price

Wholesale price x 2 = retail price

It's simple.  Well, it SEEMS like it's simple.  Calculating the cost of your materials is easy enough.  But there's that little part called "labor."  How the hell do you figure out labor?  What do you pay yourself per hour?  I used to be a salaried professional, but it worked out to more than $30/hour.  People love handmade art, but they don't love it at $30+ an hour.  However, you don't want to only give yourself $10/hour -- you probably could do better at Mickey D's.  (I'm basing this on the "I'd be a manager in a few weeks" McDonald's theory, not the "I'd be the disgruntled employee stuck in burger assembly forever" McDonald's theory.)

One of my pieces that took a loooong time.

And let's talk about hours.  I'm fairly new to metalsmithing.  I've only been doing it for two years.  In many ways, I'm still learning.  Certain pieces I can crank out quickly.  But if you see something fairly detailed in my shop, it took me MANY hours (days) to make it.  Add in my obsessive-compulsive need to file, file, file the metal, and we're talking an outrageous labor tally for a little ol' necklace.

So where does that leave you?  Guessing, that's where.  I slapped some prices on my jewelry, half using the formula and half winging it.  I was happy with it -- and ignoring the fact I was operating at a financial loss -- until I was questioned by some friends who have been metalsmiths much longer than I have.  I told them my prices and they were incredulous.  They told me I was selling myself way short.  "Not everyone is a metalsmith," they reminded me.  Then they made some pricing suggestions.

These suggestions were CRAZY.  Some of them doubled my original price!  I liked my pieces, I thought they were good -- but even I couldn't afford some of them at these prices.  So where does that leave my friends who like my work?  And that brings you to two dirty little truths of being an artisan:  You can't afford your own stuff, and you can't necessarily sell to your friends.  Especially if you used to be a journalist, because that means a lot of your friends are poor.  Or laid off.  Or both.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what my metalsmith friends had said.  In the end, I had to remind myself I'm trying to move beyond this being a hobby.  I wanted to open a business and try to make a living off my work.  I thought of Zales.  People don't waltz into Zales expecting to get a quality piece of jewelry for $35.  Now, I don't make what Zales makes.  But they don't make handcrafted, one-of-a-kind jewelry like I do.  There's value in that.

We'll see what happens.  It's way too early to know what kind of success I'll have -- my store has only been open for four days.  The sales I have made remind me that I have a skill and people will pay for that skill if it's done well.  As my skills evolve, "done well" will have different meanings.  So pricing my jewelry will be an ever-evolving process.  That means it's possible that it'll always be hard for me to do.  But I can live with that, because it means I'll still be in business selling jewelry.

Here's my site:  www.slathered.etsy.com 

(P.S. I realize this doesn't even get into wholesale vs. retail prices.  I'll get into that some other time -- that's a whole other pricing debate that I can't mentally handle right now.)

Becoming a metalsmith

Becoming a metalsmith has been a long process for me.  I first started beading jewelry COUGH! COUGH! years ago, when I was in college.  My mom still wears some of the jewelry I made then, bless her.  I got better at beading over the years.  I made wedding jewelry for some people.  But I wanted to do more, and metalsmithing raised my curiosity.  It's not something you can easily learn on your own, though, unless you don't mind losing some fingers.  Plus, I had a full-time job as a newspaper editor.  The hours could be long and unpredictable, making it hard to take a class.  But I finally found enough stability that I was ready to start learning ...


And then I got pregnant.  There's no rule that says you can't learn metalsmithing while pregnant, but no one in their right mind is going to let you sign up.  You are Potential Lawsuit #1.  You breathe in all kinds of toxic fumes and dust while working with metal -- no one's going to take the risk of a miscarriage on their watch.  Or a two-headed kid with webbed fingers.


So I put it off for a couple more years.  A baby and a blowtorch are not the best match.  But once my daughter started preschool, I knew it was time.  And we had conveniently moved close to Lorton Workhouse, which offered metalsmithing classes.


It didn't go smoothly at first.  Me and soldering, we aren't best friends.  I expected skill to immediately shine down on me.  This is where the violin and I went wrong back in fourth grade.  I wanted to be able to play "Flight of the Bumblebees" instantly, but I couldn't.  It was the same with soldering.  My metals wouldn't fuse.  There were tears.  But this time I persevered, and it got better. 

It's been almost two years since I took that first class, and I'm ready to move on again.  I left journalism after I had my daughter, and she started full-time school in September.  It's time to start working again.  So I'm opening a jewelry store on Etsy in a few minutes.  All of the pieces were made by me.  I'm excited, but I also feel like I'm going to throw up a little.  Most good things are like that, I think.  Talking about it calms me down some.  So I'm going to talk about it some here.  Every few days I'll write about metalsmithing and making jewelry, and real life will probably get mixed in.  You should check it out.  There are worse ways to spend 10 minutes.

And check out my Etsy site:  www.slathered.etsy.com   It's been a long time coming!