Inevitably, no matter how much work you’ve made in the past few months, one morning you wake up and say “Oh my God, is there only THAT much time left before the show?” And then, whatever kind of artist you are, you hustle down to your studio to see what’s what, hoping for more and expecting less.
I’m a jeweler, and my studio is downstairs, windows overlooking the yard which is coming into bloom. Finding my jeweler’s apron, pausing a moment before the T-shirt hung on my studio door that says “Go To Your Studio and Make Stuff”, I mentally add the order to myself “NOW” and enter. I see the sign that hangs just inside my studio and says “Chaos, Panic, and Disorder: My Work Here Is Done”, and I prepare to create just that, with the prayer that what will emerge is finished jewelry, gorgeous and ready for critique and sales.
I check the nooks and crannies in my studio, looking for finished work, almost finished work, work that could be finished, mining the caches of what is possible. And that’s when I get intrigued; “Wow, look at that, I forgot all about it… and here is a sketch of a pendant that will be perfect with this picture stone I see… oops, whatever was I thinking to try that?” And the chase is on.
Here is a box of handmade chain maille lengths and spare jump rings, many patterns, many sizes, sterling silver and 14K gold fill, that need to be inspected, clasps added in some cases, made a little longer in others. I finish them all, then dump them in the rotary tumbler where they will rumble around and when I pour them out, shine like silver and gold treasure in a pirate’s chest.
And a treasure box of tiny silver cups, cones and domes that look like fairy stemware, and a bag of small stones that, together, will assemble into many pairs of hanging earrings.
I make bezels for picture stones, solder them to backplates, then decorate them with hand-twisted wire, chasing, whatever embellishments seem to suit the picture of that particular stone.
At about that point, I glance out the windows to my flowered yard, and note the blooming weeds and say to myself “I should be out there, actually I’d rather be out there pulling weeds…” But I persist.
And the finished work is piling up, and I take time to polish it. Then I get out the cheat sheet of how to set up my camera and photo setup, and finding that, yes, I did charge the extra camera battery, I take pictures of each piece and process it through Adobe Classic Photoshop. Next, I enter each into my inventory computer program, giving each piece its own name and number and photo. Pricing requires looking at my records of how much each piece of raw material costs and calculating. Then I package and prepare a tag for each.
I have bits of left-over silver sheet, stray jump rings, half broken saw blades, and much more jewelry making detritus scattered here and there. I will need to perform the “jeweler’s lament”, which means crawling around on the floor with a high powered flashlight looking for stray stuff, especially tiny gemstones that have jumped from the bench to their freedom, before I can vacuum.
At this point in time, the finished jewelry is sparkling, and I am finally taking an extra breath in the belief that, yes, I will finish on time. And I finish the weeding by the front yard and even have time to place a hanging plant next to the signs for “Open Studio Tour.”
