September Theme Competition

[caroleallen]

Just to get the ball rolling again, this is my non-competition entry.

[ps_bond]

I have asked Cooksons to respond here; FWIW, I have exempted myself from the theme competitions as it immediately raises the possibility of accusations of impartiality (not that there's any guarantee I'd win anyway with the quality shown here!). I do not agree that it should be open to members to decide the winner; if the members are the ones supplying the prize, then fair enough (blatant plug for my offering sheets of sticky-back copper) - but they aren't.

And I liked the butterfly too.

[ps_bond]

Just to get the ball rolling again, this is my non-competition entry.

Very cute - anodised Al?

[medusa]

Thanks for the reply Kwant, I hadn't realised that - I was busy with the day job last month and not paying much attention to the forum.

It's a funny competition in a way - there were a few points while I was making my piece for this month where it occured to me that I could just superglue the thing together, for sake of the photos, and no one would ever know that it wasn't really wearable... But I resisted the temptation!

I'm going to enter anyway - mainly because I really want a rolling mill. And also because I think I had an interesting idea this month, but choose the wrong technique to create it, and I'd appreciate advice from the people who would have done it better.

I decided to use this month to try something I'd been thinking about for a while. I 'harvested' some long grasses, and coated them in 8 thick layers of metal clay paste. I fired them in the kiln, and then formed them into a braclet, soldering the blades together. This looked amazing, and I was tempted to take photos then, but it was far too fragile to actually wear. I strengthened some weak points with solder, but realised that it just wasn't going to work. So I added a strip of silver sheet in the middle, and soldered the metal clay to this. This added the strength that I needed, but it lost the delicate look that I loved - I wanted it to look like a single blade of grass wrapped around my wrist. I oxidised the piece, and then cleared most of it off, except in the deepest bits.

I like this idea, but in pracise, I think metal clay was the wrong thing to use. It took hours of very careful burnishing to shine and work harden this piece, and depite this, the finish isn't great. And there is no way that the clay would be strong enough to stand alone without additional silver. This might be because I didn't coat it thick enough - I've not used silver clay often. But I think that what I really wanted to do was use electro-forming? I've seen examples on this forum of people using that, and I think that's what I was trying to achieve. Or once I did an organic casting in a class, and that might have been suitable, if I'd coated the grass with something first?

Anyway, comments appreciated...

Attachment 3871 Attachment 3872

that's lovely faye. you could try casting it. I've seen fine willow branches cast and I cast seaweed into jewellery. The only thing is for a bangle you would probably need a couple of riser points, but it is possible to make fairly fine castings. this is one of my thinner seaweed bangles which is cast with two risers.

http://gentle-medusa.com/Resources/item1im.jpeg

[Georgia]

Thank you everybody for your feedback on our competitions, its always good to have debate and new suggestions.
We have had read through the thread and as always great points have been made.

Our competition rules have always stated that we cannot accept non UK entries however; we understand that we are an international company and therefore our competitions should be also.
On future cooksongold.com competitions we will change the rules so that we will now be accepting both UK and non UK entries.

When looking at the judging of our competitions we still believe that the current way is the fairest and we will continue to judge independently from the Cooksongold E-Commerce team, using our Artist in residence who has years of experience in the trade and is multi disciplined - giving them the ability to judge across the varying competitions we run.

We usually get great feedback about our competitions, and we are always delighted to receive submissions from both regular and occasional contributors to the forum - we hope that you continue to share and post your latest designs with us.

Regards
Georgia
E-Commerce Assistant

[fay144]

that's lovely faye. you could try casting it. I've seen fine willow branches cast and I cast seaweed into jewellery. The only thing is for a bangle you would probably need a couple of riser points, but it is possible to make fairly fine castings. this is one of my thinner seaweed bangles which is cast with two risers.

http://gentle-medusa.com/Resources/item1im.jpeg

Thanks Medusa. I've seen your seaweed bangles before, and absolutely love them. The one I saw pictures of before was chunkier though, I think. Those are really delicate looking, and very impressive. It's interesting to know that they were cast, thanks for sharing that.

[fay144]

Carole - I love that bangle, I really like the colours!

When I originally posted in this thread, I hadn't looked at the August entries yet. Having looked now, I liked the winning entry a lot, and it demonstrated a lot of different techniques, and seemed very professional to me. So I don't get the issue... But the thing with a competition like this is that there are lots of different criteria you could judge it by, and a lot of those will be personal opinion that will vary widely from person to person. So I don't really think it can be fair to ever describe the judging as "wrong".

Any competition like this done online is always going to be open to suspicion, but I think people need to take each other at face value or it won't work at all. I really didn't mean to stir things with my opening comments in this thread!

[Dennis]

That's cleared that up then, so how about some competitive entries from our non UK members? I was wondering about a cornucopia.

Lovely colours there Carole, in fact lovely everything. Dennis.

[Keia]

I finished this peice on the 29th, I hope that given the circumstances, that late entries are accepted. The forums have been offline for 2 days & I tried to email this to Cooksons but both emails were bounced back by postmaster "unable to deliver".

My competition entry is the Harvest Fruit Basket Brooch.
It's been made from copper sheet, some recycled copper wire, silver wire and copper & silver granulations.
The bowl is 28mm diameter & the leaves are 15 and 20mm length.
I hoped to capture the true feeling of harvest in a very short space of time =)

[Georgia]

Hi All,

We are very sorry that our Forum has been down over the weekend. Due to these circumstances we are extending the deadline of our September competition, the closing date will now be Tuesday 2nd October at midnight. Once again our apologies.

Regards
Georgia Benham
E-Commerce Assistant