Organize Your Wolf Tools

November 7, 2009

Do you have a can (or four) of Kate Wolf’s wax carving tools? Do you teach?  Do you need to make sure you have as many tools at the end of the night as you did at the beginning?  Do you have a laser cutter?  (Well why not??)  If so, this post’s for you. The [...]

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Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

July 21, 2009

The first Earthrise ever seen by human eyes. Normally, I try to keep my musings here at least tangentially related to metalsmithing, in some respect.  Not today. 40 years ago today, two men stood upon the surface of the moon.  For the first time in all of history, our species stood on another world.  To [...]

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Blade Runner Blues

July 14, 2009

I know the title of my next series of pieces.  I just have no idea what they look like. A bit of background.  Surprisingly, I’m something of a geek.  I’ve always enjoyed the movie Blade Runner.  Borders just had a half off sale on all their blue-ray disks.  They happened to have the ‘Final Cut’ [...]

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A bibliographic note

June 8, 2009

An interesting point came up in class last week.  In various of my recent blog posts, I’ve made comments about silversmithing and jewelry skills that can’t be learned from books, they have to be passed along through physical repetition and training. Lest someone mistake me for an anti-intellectual, I’ve got more books on metalsmithing and [...]

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What would you save?

May 13, 2009

As the readers of this blog may (or may not) know, I live in Santa Barbara.  Normally, I describe it as the closest thing I’ve ever found to paradise.  Sometimes, it does a pretty good impression of hell too.  Last week was a hell week.  Tuesday afternoon, the hills above town caught fire.  Again.  For [...]

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Maybe the Doomsayers Were Right

May 3, 2009

A couple of days ago, a young silversmith from the UK contacted me asking for information about post-graduate studies in the US in silversmithing. I ended up having to send her a fairly negative assessment of the educational opportunities here in the States, at least in regards to the study of serious silversmithing in the [...]

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Shakespeare was right.

April 19, 2009

Shakespeare was right: “First thing we do….kill all the lawyers”.  (Henry VI, Pt2, Act 4, scene 2.) Hardly a unique or original thought, even in his day, but every so often it does have a certain attraction. Today’s exercise in fantasy juricide is brought to you by way of trying to write a handout to [...]

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A Walk in the Woods

March 6, 2009

A walk in the woods. (or: no sh-t, I think I graduated from Hogwarts.) Most of this was written while sitting in the departures lounge of the Columbus airport, waiting for my flight back to California after attending Gary Griffin’s retirement party at Cranbrook, in June of 2006.  I sometimes write as a way of [...]

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Ghosts of Lascaux

February 23, 2009

In my last blog entry, I mentioned the sprayed handprints on the cave wall at Lascaux.  16,000 years, and it’s still crystal clear what their message is:  “I was here”.  There’s something universal about that impulse to make a mark on time. In an odd bit of karmic symmetry, I was watching the DVD of [...]

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Whither the hand?

February 19, 2009

I recently organized a large order of metalsmithing books for students in my classes at Adult-Ed.  These were all good books, well written, explaining some of the most fundamental aspects of metalsmithing as a craft.  Many of the students admitted to being ‘collectors of books’ who had large libraries devoted to the subject.  Lord knows [...]

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