My studio is usually a mess right up until 15 minutes before a class.  I recently bought my jewelers bench from Warg Etc.  I love it.  I feel inspired to create new jewelry every night when I get home from work.  It’s amazing how much the bench has organized the studio.  Here’s a peek into the studio with my new bench.

Last week I was reading Tamra Gentry’s blog.  She mentioned in her blog that she is selling some of her hammers.  I have a collection of hammers.  I have them displayed on my wall in the studio like art.  I love looking at them.  I have almost all of the Fretz mini hammers.    I bought Tamra’s Peddinghaus Embossing hammer.

Make sure to check out Tamra’s jewelry on her website to see all the amazing stones she uses in her jewelry.

This is a picture of all my hammers.  Most are displayed on the wall and a couple more a waiting for some more wall space including my mallets.

I received Charles Lewton-Brain’s book, Foldforming, today from Amazon. I am in love with this book. I am have been wanting to learn how to add veins to leaves by using fold forming techniques, but Charles Lewton-Brain has taken fold forming to the nth degree. His step-by-step instructions in the book are so easy to follow. He will be teaching this summer at Metalwerx in Waltham, MA. I wish I had the time/ money to go. It’s a week long class starting August 6th. Charles Lewton-Brain has published many articles ranging from Fold Forming, to Patinas for Small Studios, to Small Tools for Jewelers. These are wonderful articles to add to your library. You can get many of these articles one on CD. He has also written many articles on Ganoskin. Here’s my fist attempt at fold forming. Nothing is filed yet or sanded. I had a blast hammering away at the metal. I think this was the most I’ve ever used my torch. I cannot wait to get into the studio to make more pieces.

We had a wonderful class weekend before last (June 28th and 29th) at Warg Etc in Scarborough, ME. This was the first 2-day metal clay class with Pauline Warg. On Saturday I taught Metal Clay Basics and on Sunday, I was a student in Pauline’s class, Metal Clay Enameling. It was a great class. I had a hard time at first getting the colors to work with me….but that’s because I was reading the chart backwards…..I was looking at how the colors appeared on copper not silver. In the end I loved my butterfly and koi fish. I did not experiment with any of the opaque colors since I had a lot of texture I wanted to see through the colors. I really enjoyed working with the translucent colors. It took a while, but the best results were when I layered the colors.

Here are some pictures from the class:

We had a great weekend in Cambridge at NOCA this weekend.

In addition to the obvious goal of doing a show (selling some jewelry), we really enjoyed (the so much more important goals) of seeing good friends, and talking about our classes with nice people.

Here area some photos of the setup for people who were not able to attend the show.