[Jewelry making - Article 01119] - Re: [Orchid] Drawbenches notes

[John Donivan]

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>     It seems like there is this little story going on in our heads
>     that it is wrong to buy wire or stock 

    Orchid is offline at the moment, but hopefully this will just be
    queued. This is important. It's important enough to keep after it
    until it's understood. I'll start by saying yet again that if anyone
    wants to pick up pinecones, string them on kite string and call it a
    necklace you will have my blessings. The issue is for any who want to
    grow in the field and be something greater. There is a field that is
    unfortunately not formalized (should be) but it still exists, and
    that would be called "Jewelry Engineering". I am guilty of the same
    thing in my life - I enjoy language, study it casually, and I thought
    that a linguist was just more of the same, just bigger. Then I had a
    moment when I realized it wasn't just more, it was different in ways
    I never knew. I had some of the ingredients, but I didn't have the
    soup you get when you meld all that knowlege in a pot for 8 hours. My
    Mother (GRHS) had that problem in a big way - she complained that
    anthropologists would treat her like a novice when she had read so
    much - I looked at her library and realized that she had never read
    anything really deep. She had read "Lost Wax Casting", but she never
    read "Handbook of Induction Heating (Manufacturing, Engineering and
    Materials Processing)". She didn't know the math, in other words. Let
    us use Crayons as an analogy (without the childish connotations, just
    a toolset). Most people here, including me, started in jewelry with a
    box of 8 crayons - #1 is 22ga sheet, #2 is 18 ga wire, and etc. Then
    you get aspirations and buy the 24 box, then the 64 box, then you
    realize that you can buy individual crayons of any color from the
    "refiner". Life is good. And maybe you think that those in the bigs
    must have giant sets of crayons. But - what we have here is 3
    crayons: red, green and blue, and they're not crayons, they're a tub
    of crayon material. If you go to the aforementioned Faberge, which
    does indeed exist, though it's different now, you will find casters,
    casting filers and assemblers, enamelists, polishers, setters. Maybe
    you will assemble bracelet links with long strands of wire woven
    through them (a typical link). That wire will be supplied you, and no
    doubt will come from a refiner or the refinery department. Way over
    there, in the corner, is the model maker, and right next to him is
    the special order man - the artists, and the ones who determine what
    the next products are going to be, in real terms. That product is not
    limited by the size of the crayon set - they don't say, "Well, we
    have to do it this way because of the thickness of 18ga." They don't
    say, "Welll, we have these crayons, what can we do with them? - look
    we just got a new prussian blue" They start with the design, and then
    make it by doing whatever is necessary to turn the paper image into
    metal. 3 crayons, not 500. 

http://www.donivanandmaggiora.com
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