This year it was a great year, minus any rocks, flips, or personal injuries. We had interesting weather, snow in Laramie-Wyoming, hid from a tornado in Seibert, Colorado, 3 days of rain and great sales in Belleville, Ill. We made it thru Des Moines with only one threatened wind storm that never came, more great sales and a beautiful drive home that took us north of Joplin, Missouri the day the tornado hit there. We were lucky. While we were saving a turtle that day in Missouri, helping it cross the road, Joplin was hanging on.

We had more rain in Salem (the first rain on the show in 35 years!) and welcomed being in Bellevue, Wash in a lovely inside parking garage. At Art in the High Desert-Bend, Oregon, the show we help produced with 3 other board members…we were honored, surprised and deeply touched to be awarded a Bench Mark Award by the AHD artists to us for putting on the kind of show they wanted to come to.

And we ended the show season at Art in the Pearl, Portland, Oregon…our other “home” show. We love the Pearl.

…And now its September the post show month. And this year I am determined to take September off, the calm after the rapids. A corny analogy to be sure, but apt.

I’m cleaning the studio….which you can see it badly needs, packing for a wonderful trip our son and his lovely lady; planned by them just for us, taking long naps, riding my bike, and enjoying the delayed summer as it finally is hot in Central Oregon.

How do I work here? Much less find small pieces of metal.....Time to clean it up.

A fine end to a wonderful show season. Thanks all for making it memorable, profitable, full of laughter, and coming along with Dave & I for the ride.

Carla

Also to check in on my other life you can go to the Art in the High Desert blog: http://artinthehighdesert.blogspot.com/    to see what’s up with AHD.

More later. Sooner.

I promise.
Carla

But to catch up since December!

January 2011: Relaxing thinking all my life was up-to-date, could let go for a while. Working on jewelry commissions, life was good, cold-snowy, but good. I was in control. Silly me.

February 2011: Damn me. Art in the High Desert was in Jury Mode had a pile of work to do to organize that.

March 2011: Jury results were released. Lots to organize that, work with accepted artists, write 86! detailed jury feedbacks for artists who requested them. So much work, but so important to do. I also etched 10 sheets of expensive! sterling silver to hold me thru the summer.

April 2011: Hummm, show season is coming, still working on jury feedback, have commissions I’m trying to get done, but summer is still far far far away.

May 2011: Damn Dave! He pointed out that Belleville, Illinois—a great show is just around the corner. Panic mode….Art int he High Desert still needs my time, the studio needs my time, wasn’t I going to cross country ski more?

I made it through May, went to Belleville’s Art on the Square 2011, had a wonderful show. Followed that with a trip to Indianapolis for an art/show directors’ conference. And now am home.

May’s photo for you is Dave & I and our trusty mini van hiding from a tornado in Seibert,Colorado. Can ya see us?

Carla

Fortunately there’s a tool for this challenge.

More  edifice then a tool my solution sits in the corner of my studio waiting to wield its amazing strength. Technically its called a hydraulic press. But more often then not its referred to as The Poofer.

It sits 18″ high with 3 thick steel plates. The driver of this tool is a house jack that can and exert many pounds of pressure on metal. The essential ingrediant are my urethane spacers whose special characteristics allow them to flow into voids of my dies.

Eh what?

From the top without the metalsmithing terms.

Metal is ever bendable. And will yield to force. The hydraulic press has been designed to take advantage of that but needs a few more special pieces of equipment to make it work, besides thick steel and a house jack.

The first is a die, a hole if you wish, that is cut into the shape one wants the metal in. These dies are made of a variety of tough, dense material so they can stand the amount of pressure exerted by the press. Mine are made of brass and a filler to so I can reuse them and I can make double-sided poofed shapes. It takes time and precision to make these dies. I want to design pleasing shapes I can use in a variety of ways before I make any new die.

Urethane pads

The next item needed is something to push the metal into the void in the die. And not any material will do. Most rubbers and soft  plastics will just thin out (squish flat) when put under pressure. That is where urethane has unique properties that have it flow into the void distributing the force into the unsupported metal.

Die ready to press

Once this is all assemble its time to “poof” or press the shape. It would be simple if I could simple take the press up to full pressure, but it requires many smaller steps. Because if one goes too fast the metal will not bend, but tear. It is a combination of annealing (make the metal more malleable) pressing a small bit, annealing-pressing, etc until the proper depth is achieve.

One shape fine---one torn shape

This process also requires extra metal around the edges of the shape-a flange – so this process is both labor intensive as well as expensive in metal usage.

From here the piece is cut free of the & the fun begins. What to do with the shape? Sometimes as in the Yin Yang Earrings above I have a specific idea. Other times I just start to play.

Below is a variety of hydraulic pressed pieces that have been incorporated into my work or is just an idea I’ve been working on. Mostly these are older pieces. I haven’t done much “poofing” lately.

old locket project

Silly Bird Pin

3 Fish Pins

Large pod bracelet

I think it is a riveting hammer of a by-gone profession. I really don’t know for what or how it was used. Any ideas? I don’t use it but it is part of my hammer collection.

One of the many reasons I love being a metalsmith is the opportunity to buy and learn to use new tools. We’ll be exploring my studio to see some of my favorites and how I use them. Here’s a preview of what’s to come.

The Poofer

The Smasher

You can never have enough.

Really!

Open Wide…

You cut it all by hand?

Well, almost all of it.

Fire, my lovelies.

What I can’t live without.

Whatisit?

BTW this is my riveting hammer, a bit different in shape and size, but a similar function.

Our dot is now married to a most wonderful man, who brings with him a great family. The Fox Fam has been enlarged and enriched! This was an unexpected bonus to marrying off the kid. I had only thought in terms of her being married happily and moving all her stored stuff outta my house, finally. To have her find a man with a great family is an unexpected delight. Extra bonus, our son-her brother & the groom’s sister were the officiants for the wedding. And as the son told people all summer, “I’m going marry my sister this September.” And that he did, sorta, while wearing his beloved grandfather’s re-tailored summer “ice cream” suit.

Friends were married the next week in Napa/St.Helena, California. They did so to give all us guests a present of being in Napa during the crush (when the grapes are picked and smashed for wine) and to let us discover this most amazing area. A most sublime-dreamy wedding it was.

Art in the Pearl, Portland. Wowsers! what a show. Its always our best and such a great way to end a summer. Its nice to finish a season with such an appreciative audience. We must jury into the show each year, so we cross our fingers and put our best images out there and hope the jury likes us, so we can it all again next year.

And speaking of the Art in the Pearl. What is wrong with this  picture?

This would be my broken right arm. Not a good thing for a right-handed metalsmith. I was running to a porta pottie switched directions quickly and my feet got way behind the rest of me. A curb & I met rather abruptly. Damn. Not my best move. It would have been so much better if I’d been in a bar fight.

I am one-armed for a few more weeks. And I must say its a raging bore. Each day tho’ my right hand and arm sneak in to do more things that the left arm has been doing, so I should be back up to full strength soon.

My next show is a ways off, Local 14 in Portland, Oregon; October 14-17. I’ll be there, with a reduced inventory, but there.

I am again humbled and grateful for the friends we have. They supported us in all ways as we set about returning our booth to its full form. Without these friends we would have never made it through this summer. Here we are a mere 2 weeks after losing our booth in Des Moines back up and running at Salem Arts Festival here in Oregon.

My rings were even part of the massive I-5 freeway billboard. It’s quite a surprise to see one’s rings so BIG.

From there we went immediately to the Bellevue Arts Festival in Bellevue, Washington. This is a wonderful show, with some of my favorite artists. Extra bonus for us weather weary is that it is inside a parking structure that provides shade and protection from rain, hot sun, and winds!

Then it was on to Art in the High Desert – the show we put on with a group of local artists, here in Bend, Oregon. This is our baby and we had 3 weeks to put the final touches on it before welcoming this year’s artists. We in our 3rd year and it gets better each year.

Tom Hassler-photographer

A week after Art in the High Desert we were at Art in the Pearl, in Portland, Oregon. This proved to be an eventful show in many ways for me. But more in the next blog.

Happy Fall, all. Sign up for my newsletter. Once Fall is well-under way I will be starting online sales and discounts! just for my mailing list clients. If you signed up at a show, you can wait for me to add you, or add yourself. My program, MailChimp eliminates all duplicates.

Thanks for a great summer!

Carla

DMAF before the storm

We set up our booth Friday morn, went home and showered and were ready to open it up at 2 pm when the show opened.  We had a great first day on Friday & went home happy to our hosts who had beer and snacks ready for us. We like being hosted.

In the middle of the night our cell phone rang and Stephen King the director told us our booth had flipped and though his staff was working to help out we probably should come down and see what we could do. What we found was a scrambled mess. A freak wind-rain storm snuck into Des Moines and wrecked havoc with the show. Four booths (one being ours) were flipped and the interiors twirled and tossed. The show staff had saved as much art and supplies as they could and moved them to a safe place. Fortunately for us our jewelry was with us and we didn’t have to worry about lost art. But the rest was lost. Our canopy has been torn, torqued, tossed and totaled. Much of our display is broken (all our glass), wet and ruined, scattered, or soaked.

Dave surveying the remains

our wall zipper minus the wall

Is this really OUR booth?!

One of our corner connectors, torn from its leg

The next day we unpacked all the things we had jammed in the van in the hurry of the night before and sorted through things, dried out what we could, threw away a bunch of things. And so it goes. This is a double hit for us as we have display and canopy to replace and we lost 2 days of income as we lost 2 days of sales. Sigh. We bid Des Moines a sad farewell and headed home to redo, replace, repair, remake our booth.

Unloading the van to dry everything out

I must comment on the Des Moines Art Festival staff. They were there when the storm hit and were able to mitigate a lot of damage and ruin through their quick response to the storm. Without their actions things would have been so much worse. They stayed up all night helping out artists and were still up the next day, restoring tents, returning saved artwork to artists, checking weather reports. They also rented tents for all artists who lost theirs should they want to continue with the show. Kudos to DMAF! They were the best.

With the help of friends and fellow artists once home we pieced piecing back together as we have a full show schedule from now until September. And this has been the golden lining in all our troubles. We are surrounded with some of the best people in the world. It sounds hack-eyed, but knowing they are out there worrying, caring, cheering for us has made the recover so much easier. We made it to the Salem, Oregon with our “new” booth and display materials. At Bellevue, WA we were inside a parking garage out of the weather. Never has a parking garage looked so lovely. We are back up and running, still slightly twirled by events, but well on the road to full recovery.

Back up and running with a squeaky clean new booth-Salem OR

Carla

The house sitters were in place, the dog sent to the dot for a vacation, and we hit the road to Belleville, Illinois, just south of St Louis. For two weeks, Dave, the hub, had been giving me updates on the weather in St Louis. “It’s in the 80′s,” he’s been repeating. Sounds wonderful to me. I packed my accordingly, I was tired of a sloppy wet winter-spring.

As we pulled out of Bend on an overcast day I looked forward to driving into warmer dryer weather. Hey, we were heading south. I pulled on some early summer clothes hopped into the van and bid the house and studio a fond farewell. This is what we drove into.

In Laramie, Wyoming-May 12, 2010, they closed all south and east highways. With 500 miles a day to do, sitting on the edge of a snowy freeway was not in the game plan. But it was Mom Nature’s plan. We joined a long line of trucks waiting for the freeway to be plowed and reopened. Sigh.

Our next decision was to go through Kansas or Nebraska? I voted for the southern route as it had to be drier and warmer, but as we checked we found that route had tornado warnings on. Nebraska it was.

No storm can cover a country from the west coast to the midwest, but seemingly this storm did or it was chasing us. We finally pulled into Belleville, Illinois Thursday eve in the rain. And so the weekend went. Rain, some clearing as a tease, and more rain.

View from our booth.

The good news is that Belleville folks are no more intimidated by a little rain then they are  in the Pacific NW. The crowds were out, they loved the art, and best for us artists they bought. Hooray! Thank you Belleville. One can withstand a soggy show if company and appreciative clients abound. We were treated like royalty, given great food, show every hospitality by the 500+! volunteers and even awarded a prize for excellence that came with  $! This show rated as one of our best ever shows, even with the rain!

We packed up Sunday eve, damp, but happy and it was on to our next show. Problem is that it won’t happen for 5 weeks and is in Des Moines, Iowa. We decided that the best thing to do was store the van with the booth and fly home. This good decision turned into a great decision when it rained the last few minutes as we loaded up and all our carefully dried out things got wet again.

Once in Des Moines we rented a storage unit, unpacked and re-dried off our booth and its various pieces, gave our hard-working van a run through a car wash and locked the door on it all.

Drying out the booth - Des Moines 2010

Now we are thinking we’re pretty clever folks. We’ve braved snow, freeway closures, tornado warnings, torrential rain, figuring out how to dry out and store a very wet booth, and we have our earnings and prize money in hand.

But wait….we’re not home yet. We board a plane in Des Moines with a long stopover in the Dallas International Airport. While waiting to fly home we decide to have a meal & we both pick out a healthy, fresh, yummy salad, all sealed up in safe plastic. We arrive Tuesday eve and Wednesday morn Dave wakes me up to say he’s not feeling so good. Hummmm. I’m fine….must be HIS problem. By Thursday its my problem too. A raging case of food poisoning hit us both. No details, ya’ll been there, done that….but yegawds what a homecoming. We both took to our bed and I didn’t pop back up for almost a week. Is this a result of feeling smug and clever, I dunno. But it sure took the starch outta my sails.

Happily we’re all recovered, the rain is STILL coming down, its JUNE for gawd-sakes! and I’m back at the bench getting ready for Des Moines. We will reclaim our booth from the storage facility, repack our van, and go to downtown Des Moines and do it all over again.

I hope to see you there!