Finished!!!!

Done! I am pleased with the way they came out. Megan helped me with photographing them tonight. Let me know what you think!

Progress

More progress! I patina-ed two of my rings today. I am pretty pleased with them. I worked on my stock ring again but it still needs some cleaning up! Guess I will get to that tomorrow. Time to put together a process book!

Updates

I have had a lot of fun so far with the things I have been making. In order to keep my stress levels down, I am not letting myself get worked up about the rings. I am trying to keep it simple, while letting myself explore the material. So today I worked on the ring made from stock. For this ring, I really decided to embrace the forms that stock comes from. Instead of trying to make it sheet so that it was more familiar to work with I formed the stock in a way that it sits on my knuckle. If you uncurl your finger, it falls off. The point is to force your finger to stay in that position. This ring represents trigger finger which is similar to carpal tunnel. The tendons in your hand tighten up so that your finger is stuck in this curled position.
Tomorrow I want to work on patinaing my arthritis ring and finishing my wire ring components. I hope it turns out well!

Drawings for the project

Here are some images so can you can see some of my thought process for the project

Progress so far

Final Project: RINGS

For our final project we were asked to produce four rings. One out of wire, one out of sheet, one stock, and one tube. This project was more about exploring the materials and having fun with what you were doing with them. I decided to pick aliments of the hands for my concept. I am working with dermatitis, arthritis, and a few others. The project is due on thursday. So far, I have about 3 rings done. The only problem I am having is with the stock. When i made my designs, i was not sure how i would work with it. After playing with it for a while today, I have realized my original designs are useless for this. So, its back to the drawing board I'm afraid. I will post some of my sketches and a few images I have so far to show my current progress.

Images

Parts three and four were worked on at the same time. For part three, we were doing injection molding. I previously posted pictures from that during the process. At first, I was very displeased and against it. However, I think after they were colored, they came to life a bit more and I am slowly starting to like them more and more. It was a huge learning process because none of us had ever used the injection molder before...and we definitely learned a great deal from it. It took me awhile to get the hang of injecting my mold, at first it would not inject into the whole piece. Then came experimenting with trying to color it. At first I wanted to use a needle and inject the color inside hoping it would trickle down throughout the entire thing. However, this did not work the way I planned. I found RIT dye to work the best on the plastic. The dye I used for these pieces was actually a grey, however,as you can see it came out very blue which I am happy with.
Part number four of the project was making a piece in Rhino and getting it printed through shapeways. As you can see, these are the four different rings that are below the earrings. I wanted to make them more accessible than the two previous pieces I made for the series. I chose to use Sanskrit because, although the Kawa model is Japanese, Sanskrit is a language that speaks to people as "zen" and that is what I wanted to convey in these rings. Around the band they say life, health, energy, and flow. They are pinky rings printed in white strong and flexible, blue strong and flexible, black detail, and aluminoide. Unfortunately somewhere along the line of building and printing the pieces, they got enlarged and my final end product is way to big to fit on someones pinky. I am very happy with the rings and plan on re printing them in the correct size.
Hope you like them!

The injection molding process

These are some images from the 3rd part of our project this semester. We were supposed to use the same concept as before, but this time we are doing injection molding. It is a learning process. I am not sure how I feel about the process yet, or about the pieces in general. But I am learning a lot.

Larger Pictures

My design brief and artist statement can be seen farther down. I just wanted to repost my images a bit larger.

After Action Review

The process of making the hydraulic press earrings was incredibly stressful, and time consuming, but in the long run I am quite happy with the way they turned out and pretty satisfied by the progress I have made over the course of the semester so far. I ran into many bumps in the road but these contributed to the learning process; if everything worked the first time I would be taking a lot less away with me from the project.
Initially, I planned on making a variety of seedpods, however, the Kawa Model and creating “river rock” earrings I found a much more interesting concept. In the end, it called for more research and essentially more work since instead of making the project once, I was now making it two times. I did not think about this fact when designing and honestly, I don't know if I will make earrings again for a project like this. But it is what I wanted so I am happy.
I began exploring different forms that could work for the earrings and had a few problems with how big, the weight, the shape, and the hinge. In order to work these problems out I started making the forms out of clay and holding them up to my ears in order to get a better feel. I am happy with the form I ended up choosing although they are a bit heavy on the ears.
Before making the actual project I did a variety of tests using the hydraulic press, patination, and a hinge sample because my final project I wanted to use silver. Once I thought I was ready I proceded in the siler. Apparently I was not ready because I busted through the fist piece of silver I had bought. This was pretty stressful because of the price of silver currently. Luckily, I can melt it down an reuse it later, but when this first happened I was very upset. I then bought more silver and of course did the same thing again. I am a slow learner. I was able to get 4 forms that were a bit shallower than I thought I wanted them to be but that worked out in the end although it means I could not put quite as much material as I would have liked in the earrings.
Chasing and soldering the forms together was not to big of a problem. It took a long time but I managed to get it down.
My hinge was a different story. The hinge is quite small at the bottom of the piece; I had done a smaple hinge on two pieces of flat metal but working on a 3D form was completely different. I practiced on a copper maquette first but was not successful and decided to go straight to silver. The first hinge took me about 6 hours total which was not bad for prepping everything and clean up. The 2nd one I almost gave up on. I have never struggled so much in my life. It would not work. At one point, I had to walk away. I came back the next day and was again struggling with it for hours. At one point, Rachel said "just go for a walk Anna". I did, and what do you know, after 12 hours of labor it actually worked.
The night before the project was due left me with a lot more work than I usually like to leave this close to the deadline.
Around 11 pm I was holding the earrings up to my eat to decide where I wanted to put the earring posts. I dropped one, it bounced on the floor and the seam broke in half. I was devastated, went for a walk and decided it was going to solder back right then and there.
After that, I had less problems but it the process was incredibly slow. As I got more tired things took longer but still I made progress.
In the end it was the most stressful project I have ever worked on but I would not have learned nearly as much otherwise.

To Contain

Project Briefing:
Examine 3d forms that contain things. Look broadly: the more variety the more points you get. For the design research phase disregard scale and consider all materials: Look At Form. Look at innovative approaches. Look at how various civilizations have approached containing things. THEN come up with designs for a ‘container’ that is designed to contain something specific. Consider various approaches: product design, art object, hybrid objects.

My Project:
I am a studying occupational therapy student as well as a metals and jewelry student. For this project my goal was to bring my two worlds together. My container reflects the Kawa model of occupational therapy which is a model of practice that represents your life as if it is a river. Simply stated, when the water flows freely, you are in good health. When complications arise it is said the river rocks are blocking your flow. My project consists of earrings in the form or river rocks. When I am feeling in good health, the bottoms of the earrings will hinge open letting "water" a silk material, flow out of them. When I am feeling unhealthy, the earrings would be closed up preventing the flow of the river.
This project has multiple stages that work on creating your piece in different ways. The first part is making it out of metal, the second using an injection molder, and lastly, through a cad program. This is the first one I made however, the design can evolve with each of the different processes we go through. Let me know what you think! Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Part 1, Project 1

Part 1 of the project is complete! Overall I am happy with the way they turned out. The fabric is not what I want so when I work on the ones made with the injection mold and through CAD I will be looking for something different. This project has been one of the most challenging I have ever took on in my life. The earrings are 22 gauge sterling silver which have been die formed and soldered together. At the base of each earring is a hinge that when open, allows silk to flow out of them. The surface treatment is a simply liver of sulfer, but it dulled down the silver causing the blue of the silk to really pop. During the process I made every possible mistake but through it all, I learned a lot and am happy with the outcome. The weight of the earrings is a little heavy but if I had attempted to scale down the size, I think it would have been practically impossible to put a hinge on them. In the past I have usually worked on a larger scale so it was a much different experience. Please let me know what you think and don't hesitate to ask questions concerning the piece. Any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated. I will also be adding more pictures tomorrow.

To Disable

For Rhino we are working on a ring project. I decided to create a piece that teaches the wearer what it would be like to not have the ability to move your hand sufficiently. This would helpful to people going into occupational therapy, as well as people who might have family members in the situation so that they understand better what the person is going through. The Ring goes on the middle finger, and wraps around up the entire length of the finger. At the wearers fingertips, there are caps on 3 of the fingers. This creates a lot of difficulty for the wearer to move and use their fingers efficiently. Once the ring is rendered I will post images!

What is Crowdsourcing?

To use crowdsourcing is to tap into the collective intelligence and opinions of the public in order to complete business-related tasks that a company of individual would normally either perform themselves or outsource to a third-party provider.

Why does it matter to an individual?

Crowdsourcing can improve productivity and creativity while minimizing labor and research expenses. Using the Internet to solicit feedback from an active and passionate community of customers can reduce the amount of time spent collecting data through formal focus groups or trend research, while also seeding enthusiasm for upcoming products.

This information was found from
http://www.bnet.com/article/what-is-crowdsourcing/52961

There are many different websites out there that can be used to your advantage some of these include the basics, twitter, blogs, facebook, flickr, etc. However, there are also many others. Some of these include 99designs, namethis, Chaordix, kluster, reddesignme, ponoko, and utest,

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

So I have some good news, and some bad news. Good news is...so far I have finally settled on a design I really like for my River rocks, and made a model that you can see above. It is currently in copper, and glued together. Other good news...I sucessfully (or I think successfully) made my first hinge (up until the tacked part) Bad news: my room mate thought she was looking out for me and tried to rub off what she thought was rust from my hinge today while I was in class...it was yellow ochre from using it as a stop flow...and since it was only tacked, she broke it. needless to say, i am incredibly unhappy considering I spent most of yesterday working on it. Poor girl has not come near me since I got home (which I am glad about) So, hopefully I can fix it before class tomorrow...anyway, here are the pictures!