Universal Stake Holder

March 9, 2011

For a couple years I have wanted to replace the stump I’ve been using for my metalsmithing. It’s just too small and light, so it tends to walk away while I’m hammering. The primitive way of holding stakes is not really very good either. The holes keep getting larger, and it’s really hard to keep […]

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Simple Treasure Box, hammer-formed brass

February 24, 2011

I made this for a birthday gift for my wife a couple weeks ago. I wanted it to be simple, since I didn’t have a lot of time. The design is nothing new, although I didn’t consciously copy anything, there are probably millions of them with the same shape around the world, but maybe not […]

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My TV Debut, two minutes of fame

February 16, 2011

About three weeks ago I received a call from Eric Olson, Fort Wayne TV news man, asking me if he could come to my studio to put together a feature about me. He had seen my work at a local exhibition where his wife also had artwork on display. He only gave me about 36 […]

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Where are the spam filters?

January 13, 2011

For the last week or so my Orchid blog has been getting huge amounts of spam. This morning I had 15 new ones. Clicking on the spam button gets rid of them, but doesn’t seem to prevent new ones from coming in. Almost all of them show the same email address, so I’m wondering what […]

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Brass Lilies

November 27, 2010

This is a spin-off from the advent wreath, and the lily cross, the first of which I made several years ago. It suddenly occurred to me that I could make lilies just as lilies, and that with some tooling I could make them quickly enough that I could sell them fairly inexpensively, and I have […]

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“Anemonoid” – hammer-formed brass

November 17, 2010

This was an experiment to test out an idea on a small scale, and was successful enough to be tried again on a larger scale. My goal is to make a functional bowl with the “tentacles” all around the edge. In the first picture the flat disc has been crimped for raising, then second, after […]

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Homemade draw bench

November 9, 2010

When I posted about the advent wreath, it was suggested that I could find a faster way to form the tubes than hammering by hand. I agreed, especially since I had an idea of making large numbers of brass lilies to try to sell on Etsy. Part of the problem is a regular drawing die […]

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Bronze Vase, hammer-formed and welded

November 1, 2010

This will not be a detailed step-by-step pictorial, but I did get enough pictures to give a hint as to how it was made. I did most of this during very hot weather, and couldn’t be bothered with taking a lot of pictures. I had just finished my large bronze urn, and wanted to try […]

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Advent Wreath in hammer-formed brass

October 25, 2010

This is something I thought of almost a year ago, and had a rough image of it in my head. I found it very difficult to try to sketch or make a model, so with just a few mathematical calculations I jumped into it, without really knowing how it would turn out. There were times […]

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“Crested Longtail”, hammer-formed brass bird sculpture

October 6, 2010

Sometimes I spend months or even years working on an idea, and other times I get a sudden inspiration that I have to turn into three-dimensional reality immediately. This piece was one of those sudden inspirations. I had a scrap of silver left over from my “Silver Streak” project that looked to me like some […]

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