As you might know I was doing a course in Birmingham last week. The course was part of the colleges summer programme, if you want read more about this click on my previous post here.
Since this is a hands on course we were encouraged to bring as many of our own tools as possible, stakes and other equipment were provided by the college. So I had the unenviable task of trying to pack everything into one tiny suitcase. Don’t worry I didn’t bring my tools on board, I’m not sure airport security or my fellow passengers wouldn’t have taken kindly to me bringing a supply of hammers, saw blades and soldering flux as hand luggage!
When we arrived down to the workshop in the basement it was straight to work which was brilliant. The course was synclastic and anticlastic raising and hammering so Cynthia began by giving us some great tips on how to hammer correctly. Once we had sorted out our tools and run around the jewellery quarter buying up every raising hammer available we settled down to our five days of hammering.. bliss!!
The first day was spent creating synclastic forms and exploring the various possibilities such as counter-synclast where you have two synclastic forms going in opposite directions on the same sheet of metal and selective synclast where the synclasting hammering is divided into sections. Here are some photos of some of the samples I did on the first day.
On the second day we started straight into anticlastic forming, beginning with a simple bangle design and then trying out other variations of anticlastic forming such as making anticlasted ribbons and synclast to anticlast forms. Once we got the hang of synclast and anticlast we moved on to spiculums. Here are some pictures of my anticlastic forms. I have lots more photos to add so I’ve decided to break this into two posts…
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