Some Art to Shake Things Up

Great news!  I remembered to take (almost) step-by-step pictures of one of my art projects.  What I mean by almost is I may have forgotten to photograph a couple steps.  Even though I have been taking the half-year jewelry/metals art class since January, I keep forgetting to take pictures.  This time, I made sure to do it.  I have also been eating to post about something other than soccer.  First, there is the high probability you readers are bored of it and second, I don’t really feel like describing how we tied, again, despite the face we were up 2-0 (so it really felt like a loss).

For this art project, we made pendents which will go on a necklace.  These pendents consisted of two pieces of metal that were soldered together (solder is pronounced with a silent “l,” like “sodder”).   Soldering is a technique where two pieces of metal are connected through a lot of heat and tiny bits of metal that act as glue (between the two pieces) when melted.  My last project involved putting two layers of metal by cold-connection which is accomplished by using rivets.  Riviting is a whole other process, but the point is each project incorporates a new method of metal making, each one harder than the last.

Another requirement of the pendents was the piece had to have negative space, or in special cases, just a really complicated top piece design.  I decided to have negative space with a relatively simple top piece.  If you don’t understand what is being described here, don’t worry, it will make more sense when you see the pictures.

The first step was designing the piece and drawing it out on paper.

I decided to go with a moon (representing water) and fire.  These two things symbolize opposites and balance (at least, to me).  They do come from the show, "Avatar: The Last Airbender," if they seemed familiar.  My plan was to have the bottom piece be nickel silver and the top piece (the fire) be brass which looks like gold.  My negative space would come from sawing a crescent moon out of the nickel silver.  Of course, we had to brainstorm other designs as well.  One of my other options was a leaf where the veins would be a sheet of metal on top another sheet of metal.

Next, put in a metal order and acquire your metal.

Nickel silver and brass squares of metal.

On a plain piece of paper, I drew out my design, cut it out, and glued it onto my metal.  I used rubber cement so I could just peel it off when I was done sawing.

This is just a simple outline of my bottom piece.

In this class, we use a thin handsaw to cut our metal.

 Then, cut out either top or bottom piece.  In my case it was the bottom piece.

Bottom piece.

Follow with sawing out the other piece.

Top piece.

Put them on top of each other to make sure everything fits right.

As you can see, I needed to do some filing in order to shorten the ends of the fire.
I also did filing to touch up all the other edges.

Here is another picture of my pieces.

After filing and sanding the pieces (sanding helps the solder a bit), I washed my pieces extremely well with dish soap.  Washing removes any oils from the metal; it is very important to have a clean piece when soldering.  Sorry, I don't have a picture of this.

Now on to the hard part: soldering.  Since this is a pretty complicated process that would take to long to explain in detail, here is a picture of when I am finished soldering my pieces together.

As I mentioned earlier, soldering involves quite a bit of heat.  Little torches are used and when you heat up metal to this degree, it does't exactly look pretty.  The green stuff you see is called flux, which is a alien-green watery liquid that you paint onto where you want the flux to flow.  Soldering also causes fire-scale on a piece.  However, all of this goes away after putting your piece in the pickle for a few minutes.  The pickle is a chemical that gets rid of heat coloring on metal.

Upon taking it out of the pickle, my piece looked like this.

Much better, right?

You might have noticed that these are not the same colors I started out with, and I still needed to do some cleaning up around the fire.  This is where sanding comes in, once more, because it removes the pickle, like scratching off a coat of paint.  Afterwards, I buffed it to make it look much more shiny and painted Liver of Sulfur (a chemical that colors the metal) on the fire to add contrast.  This took me a couple of tries because I couldn't get it "just right."  Oh, and I drilled a hole at the top to the necklace string.

Unfortunately, I got so excited that I forgot to take pictures of the previous actions, so here is what my piece looked like at the end of class on Friday.

I kind of like it, but I kind of don't, you know what I mean? ;)

I may or may not change it next class because I have yet to decide if I like how the fire looks.  I kind of wanted it lighter, without bits of blue and purple, more of a dark golden color, but who knows?  Maybe I'll change my mind after thinking about it over the next few days.

A |ˈbākən| Mishap

bacon |ˈbākən|nouncured meat from the back or sides of a pig.
I considered myself to be a decent cook.

I can make a multitude of things ranging from a simple slice of buttered toast to a Thanksgiving dinner (minus the turkey).  Of course, I've made a numerous mistakes along the way.  There was the time I forgot to put baking soda in chocolate cupcakes (they turned out very dense and compact).  I once added baking soda to a pretzel dough when the directions said to let the baking soda dissolve in water (where one dips an unbaked pretzel before placing it in the oven).  Turns out, baking soda in a pretzel  tastes HORRENDOUS.  Like EXTREMELY salty guck.  That same night, I accidentally used half of my dad's calzone dough in making the pretzels before realizing I had mixed up the two bowls of dough.  (That was not my night.)  On other accounts, I have melted butter to the point where the cookies don't turn out flat, boiled pasta until it almost turned into complete mush, and burned white chocolate in the microwave when I was just trying to melt it.

Other than that, I've been pretty successful in my food expeditions.

However, this past weekend, I recently experienced one of, if not the worst cooking accident in the history of me.  In fact, I very nearly burnt down my house.  No joke.

And I blame the bacon.

It was a nice, fifty degree afternoon with the sun shining and the snow glistening on the ground.  I had just come home from soccer practice and was going to make lunch for the family while they were out on a walk around the neighborhood.  I decided to make sunrise sandwiches (so it was going to be more like an afternoon breakfast than a lunch).  I was trying out a recipe for this meal which involved canadian bacon as the meat for the sandwich.  There happened to be no canadian bacon lying around, so I came to the natural conclusion to use regular bacon instead.  The recipe called for warming the pre-cooked bacon in a pan, but I was already using the pam dusted pan to fry/grill five or so 1/4 inch tomato slices (about 2-3 minutes if you were wondering).  I wanted things to be ready when my family got home, so I set about multitasking.  I mixed up some eggs and put them in a second, larger pan on the stove and they began to cook. While the tomatoes were also on the stove, I placed four strips of bacon on a toaster oven pan (eight inches wide, five inches long) wrapped with aluminum foil.

Now, you must understand that "toasting" bacon has been done quite often in my household.  We put the bacon in the toaster oven, set it to a "toast" setting and keep an eye on it until the bacon grease is foaming up.  Then the bacon is removed and set on a hot plate and patted with a paper towel to absorb the excess grease.  IT TURNS OUT JUST FINE.  The worst that has ever happened is the bacon was in the toaster oven too long and ended up drily burnt.

I took it to a whole new level.

My family arrived home while the bacon, eggs, and multiple rounds of tomatoes were cooking.  My dad decided to help by preparing English muffins topped with a sprinkle of cheese.  I started putting the cooked tomatoes on a plate and the scrambled eggs in a serving bowl.  Both of our backs were facing away from the toaster oven and stove when my mom asked "Is something burning?"  I guess my dad and I were so focused on our jobs we didn't notice the smell (even though we were three feet away and my mom was in another room).  It was mostly my fault though for not watching cooking appliances that were on (something I need to improve on).

Anyway, we both turned around to see the bacon in the toaster oven COMPLETELY ENGULFED IN ONE. BIG. FLAME.  HOLY CRAP!  My dad opened the toaster oven at which point the flame split into flames and expanded out of the toaster oven and licked top of it along with the underside of the wooden cabinet that was on the wall above the toaster oven.  He immediately and started blowing on the fiery bacon as hard as he could while I kinda just stood there (I know, I'm real professional in these disaster situations).  For those of you who are confused at this point, my dad was trying to blow out six to eight inch flames because it was a grease fire and you never put water on a grease fire for it will EXPLODE.  One way to put out grease fires is eliminating the fire's air supply aka smothering it (for other methods, click here).  My dad was trying to accomplish this; there was no time to do anything else.  Luckily after a few hard exhales, the fire went out, but then a massive amount of smoke filled the house, turning the air into an ugly haze.  Plus, it smelled bad.  Fans were switched on and windows were opened to force the smoke out.  Oven mitts were used to carry the scalding toaster oven pan out onto the deck to cool atop a hot plate.  After things calmed down, there was still two problems.  The bacon was ruined and no way were we going to miss out on a bacon, egg, cheese, tomato and avocado (spontaneously added) sandwich.

I checked the bacon bag and there were four pieces remaining.  Only four.  This time I put them carefully in a pan on the stove.  I watched those precious pieces like a hawk, well maybe not to that extent.  The bacon cooked nicely, was added to the sunrise sandwiches and we finally sat down to eat.  It was delicious and all was well.

Except for one thing.

I haven't yet told you what the bacon looked like after lighting on fire.

It was not the burnt, crispy charcoal that one might expect.

No.

That bacon was melted, MELTED I SAY, so it looked like strips of TAR.  Yes, that's right, somehow I FREAKING MELTED BACON...INTO TAR!  How is that even possible?

And now *snivel, snivel* I have lost my faith in bacon.  How epically tragic.


For your convenience I present you all with a visual aid consisting of what I call "tar bacon."

Yeah, this is what it looked like.
Image courtesy of my brother.

Oh, by the way, this NFL Super Bowl XLVIII weekend, my family is having a bunch of friends over to watch the game.  AND GUESS WHAT?  I'M MAKIN' APPETIZERS AND DESSERTS!  OH YEAH!  Don't worry, nobody will be harmed in the making of these foods...And the house won't burn down...

hopefully.