"Peter W.. Rowe," wrote in message
...
On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 18:59:40 -0700, in rec.crafts.jewelry "William Black"
wrote:


I looked some of the stuff up on the web.

Some of it is remarkably ugly, if novel.

A lot of it looks like something from a Birmingham School of Jewellery
'End
of course' show that is more for looking at, showing off professional
design skills and getting a job than actually selling.

That's a pretty belittling set of statements, sir, from someone who
apparently
hasn't seen, on the web or otherwise, good examples of the kind of jewelry
that
can be made with these methods. Before you pooh pooh it too much,
consider
that those people who do this really well, create work that is quite
sought
after, and which brings high prices, and high praise from the critics and
judges
who see it, and disparaging comments usually only from those competitors
who's
work cannot compete... I'll assume that your statements arise not from
such
negative bias, but just from not having had the opportunity to see, and
preferably hold in the hand, good jewelry made this way. It can be quite
exceptional, and often the designs do not lend themselves to being made
any
other way.

Point taken.

I should be getting to Spring Fair next year and I'll have a look and see
if there's any about.

Some of it's bent tube that can be bent using any reasonable tube bending
process.

If it's bent tube, it's not anticlastic raising. Anticlastic raising is
a
process of turning strip shaped sheet metal, often tapered in width and
sometimes in thickness, into a channel shape which also curves along it's
length. Similar to a bent tube, but not closed over into a tube, and both
the
tubular or channel shape, and the long axis curves are generated at the
same
time. The difference may not seem extreme, but it gives rise to quite
different results.

Then some people in the USA seem to be selling bent tube jewellery and
calling it anticlastic jewellery.

Or at least that's what the web pages look as if they're selling.

But my own observations when abroad are that jewelry in europe
tends to be at a higher average level than in the states, or for that
matter, in
most of the rest of the world.

Thank you.

As for the wavy stake, the armourers one is about fifteen inches long,
two
inches wide and is often the subject of unsavoury jokes involving young
ladies.

Yeah, well these are smaller, and generally used either by young (and old)
ladies who're making beautiful jewelry with them, or trying to, or by
gents who
are not armourers, and who hopefully have a bit higher respect for the
ladies.

However, it would not surprise me if, though the scale of the tools is
different, the mechanical uses of the stakes, ie the types of forming they
are
used for, had some strong similarities in the geometric operations being
performed on the stakes (anticlastic curves), even if the end forms are
very
different.

That's something I've been interested in for years as I came to jewellery
from an engineering background.

It's all part of the dichotomy between the 'whitesmiths' and 'blacksmiths'
of the medieval guilds, the whitesmiths worked metal cold and the
blacksmiths worked metal hot.

But just as the goldsmiths were at the top of the whitesmith tree the
armourers were at the top of the blacksmiths tree.

I did some blacksmithing to work out what the real differences are.

The major one is that blacksmith distort metal to make their shapes, the
whitesmiths remove it much of the time.

A blacksmith who was making (for example) something that looked like a
conventional setting for a stone wouldn't even consider cutting bits of
metal away with a cold chisel, he'd bend it and distort it until it fitted
and chop the surplus off at the end of the process. A stone setter cuts
away the surplus metal until the prong is the correct shape.

The similarities, raising, sinking, engraving and such, are common to
all fabrication of metals.

--
William Black


I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
Barbeques on fire by the chalets past the castle headland
I watched the gift shops glitter in the darkness off the Newborough gate
All these moments will be lost in time, like icecream on the beach
Time for tea.