Celebrate Beauty--Celebrate Life

This my first post to this blog so I want to tell you what you are likely to find when you stop in here.

First, however, a puzzle: how did I wrap this bracelet with a copper ribbon and tie the ribbon into a bow? I'll give you a couple of minutes to think about that.

While you're thinking, here are a few of the topics you can expect to find here:

• original hand made jewelry designs, mine and others'

• techniques of metalsmithing (which is the same thing as silversmithing and goldsmithing, but without having to change your title when you change your metal)

• lapidary art, which is all the wonderful things that can happen when someone who knows and loves beautiful semi-precious stones gets his hands on a rock saw and a cabbing machine

• the ancient and modern history of metalsmithing and jewelry making, especially its rich and complex history in the Americas

• trends in jewelry design and the changing face of jewelry aesthetics

• whatever else in the lapidary and jewelry worlds interests me and I think would interest you too

So, now the solution to the puzzle: I "tied" that ribbon and bow using a technique called fold forming. It was invented in the 1980s by a goldsmith and teacher of metalsmithing named Charles Lewton Brain. Until then not much new had been invented in metalsmithing for centuries. Tools had changed, metals had changed, but metalsmithing had stayed pretty much the same---until fold forming.

Charles Lewton Brain started experimenting with ways of working copper. One thing no one did then was let the metal become folded unless they were making a box, and then they used a machine called a press break to get a crisp, finished line. Otherwise they avoided folding because if it made a crease it was impossible to get out. They had to throw away their work and start over.

But that day Brain decided to intentionally make a fold in the copper. He hammered it until it was tight and hard, and then he put the copper into a vise with the folded edge up and hammered (planished) the edge some more to smooth and further compact it. He took the copper out of the vise and pried open the fold and a raised, hardened line remained. No surprise there, except how much he liked that line. It was very distinct but not mechanistic looking.

So he turned the metal 90 degrees and did it again, and then again and again at interesting angles, and when he got through folding he had a line-patterned sheet of copper with the visceral appeal of modern art in a medium that looked centuries old. And he had done it more quickly and easily than almost anything else he could do to decorate metal because he was letting the copper do what it did naturally. That first sheet of copper looked something like this brooch:

Brain got excited and began trying every variation on folding metal he could think of, and over time the different folds and the distinctive profiles they produced began to pile up. Previously there had been a handful of ways to manipulate and decorate a metal surface with tools, and now he had 10, 20, 30 ways and counting, and they were faster and more reliable than the old ones.

He called it fold forming and taught it to his students and they came up with even more folds. Blacksmiths came to his classes and began making big fold forms in iron. Engineers and architects got wind of it and began to use it in decorative elements and building facades. If you live in a large city you may have seen it and not known what it was.

Some combinations of folds easily create three dimensional shapes that are very familiar and very difficult to make any other way---leaves, flowers, seed pods---and with some hammered veining they looked remarkably realistic. They did not appear made, but grown. I remember large copper botanical table decorations that appeared in the 80s that I now realize were fold forms. I was astonished by their organic beauty and by the fact that they could be made of metal.

Here's a picture of some sterling silver feather earrings I made. They require a lot of work but they are very simple conceptually: a single fold down the middle of a piece of silver, cut to shape with a jeweler's saw and curved by hammering one side more and harder than the other. As you can see, fold forming lends itself to anything organic.

So, finally, here's the full answer to the puzzle: The horizontal "ribbon" is an end-to-end fold the entire length of the copper strip, carefully confirmed with a urethane hammer to keep it looking soft and supple, without hammer marks. The "bow" began as a tight vertical fold, but before unfolding it I rolled the corners of the fold down and over in opposite directions. I opened it and used my urethane hammer to flatten the two ends of the bow without crushing them, and then added a couple more crossing folds around the sides so the design wouldn't be entirely symmetrical. Asymmetry suits a natural process like fold forming. The twist at the intersection of the two folds, reminiscent of a knot, occurs because the folding is not entirely even and it torques the intersection like a slipped fault line.

Oh, and I almost forgot. When they're worked, most metals harden rapidly as their crystal structure is compacted and forced into planes, and they become brittle. The worked metal can tear and break if you over stress it, sort of like cleaving a diamond along the plane of the crystal lattice. To prevent that you anneal the metal first: heat it to a dull red with a torch and cool it to room temperature before proceeding. That relaxes the crystal structure and makes the metal plastic again, so stresses spread out and the metal does not split. You have to anneal a lot. If the metal is at all thick I anneal before every fold and again before every unfolding. I've had almost finished bracelets tear like paper when I failed to anneal them often enough. Lose a couple of those and your memory for annealing improves.

That's it for this installment. More to come later.