Friday Photo

Mmmm, yum; stuff.

(In Emporium food market.)

Bunches of bananas and confidence

Hmm, well that gem shopping expedition didn’t quite go as planned.

I couldn’t face the schlep down to Chinatown on Saturday so I went to Amarin mall where there were several stalls and shops peddling gem and stones. I found a lovely shop where I told the man that I was learning to set stones and wanted something cheap but pretty that I could practice with. We started with amethysts and we moved through a host of stones whose names I’ve forgotten. Each time he brought something out I got more and more panicked: so TINY, shiny and perfectly cut. In my head I saw myself trying to measure and set them with my bunches of bananas and I felt a bit sick.  I knew they could look gorgeous. But probably only if someone else made them. He showed me all sorts of stones but I’d completely lost my confidence that I could do anything with them.

I found another stall. In a basket there were pieces of agate. I bought this one: it’s 4 cm long. I think even my bananas can make a reasonable job of setting them.

(Here’s the finished crown setting from the last post. I don’t know what the disc thing is that we’ve set but it feels like resin or even just plastic. Because it’s nicer with light behind it, I cut out a mad pattern on the back to let the light in.)

Jewellery, gems and skulls

The next stage in my jewellery making career journey is learning to set stones. This doesn’t require much fire (phew) but it does demand strict precision skills. Oh gawd.

Khun Gim found me an oval piece of rhodonite, a pretty pink and black stone to begin with. You measure the circumference with wire and then cut the metal a little bit longer than your wire. I cut it too long so I had to saw some of the extra mm off. Yes, and then I cut too much off and had to send it through the mangle to lengthen it again. Sigh.

Anyway, this ring is the result. Next I’m moving on to this resin (?) disk. This is the crown setting for it. Inside the crown setting we’ll I’ll solder a piece of wire to hold the disc at the top. Last week I asked Khun Gim ‘how do we keep the wire in the right place while I solder?’ Apparently the wire will hold itself because I’ll have cut it with such precision that it will just, erm, fit.

So this is the plan: I have to buy some stones to practice my setting skills. Bangkok is a good place to buy stones. Even though I’ve never been in the market for them you can’t help but see the shops around (and hear of the scams.) I’ve often stopped and peered into windows to look at the rubies, graded, sized and sitting in little see through trays. It’s another world to buy them though. Do a Google of Bangkok tourist scams, and the gem ones are right at the top. It has always struck me that if you’re on holiday and stupid enough to spend hundreds of pounds or dollars on rubies without the help of an independent expert, you’re kind of asking to be ripped off. Okay, this isn’t the way things should be but, sadly, it is the way it is.

Now clearly I’m not after ‘gem’ gems. I’m after something pretty or strikingly coloured and well, cheap. Remember, I might butcher it. K, who does jewellery at the same time as I do it, is a gemologist and she’s confirmed that as a foreigner the prices will rise the second I walk into the shop but she’s given me some advice. She’s advised me to reverse my normal approach; instead of ‘how much is that one?’ I should ask ‘what can I get for a 500 baht?’ (£10ish)

I shall let you know how I get on.

PS: isn't this rhodonite skull just divine? I love how his stylised look makes him appear to be wearing glasses. I want... (Source)

Friday Photo: repairs Thai style

Yikes.

Monday morning

I nearly got hit by a car and a motorcycle this morning. Not really nearly but almost nearly. It is partly the fault of lax road rules here but also my own stupidity. I recovered as our taxi drove us to the MRT (underground) station (Husband was going to work; I was going to jewellery) and then I realised that I hadn't got my partly prepped bits of jewellery with me. I had to take a taxi back home to pick them up. I considered getting back into bed and staying there just in case the day didn't improve.

Anyway, here is one of the latest pieces. This is the 'go to the back of the class and practise your handwriting soldering' design. One of the pebble shapes is copper (top left) and the rest are brass. It's quite nice, isn't it?

(*Ahem* I left the solder visible just so that you could see how beautifully I'd done it!)

Friday Photo and I Can See Again

I had a teacher, at my grammar school, who taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. She was a graphics teacher. She frightened me. I would have told you at the time that I didn’t like her but I can see now that I was afraid of her. (She belonged to the Disparaging School of Teaching Methods.) I thought she could see how stupid I was but I think she thought all the girls were stupid. It wasn’t personal.

I didn’t do graphics because fine motor skills aren’t my thing; I came to it by default on a rotation in the O’Level timetable. We’d selected ‘art’ and now we had to choose between painting or graphics. I already felt like an interloper. I was called ‘the academic one’ and my sister, ‘the creative one.’ There was no sculpture or making on offer at my school and it was many years before I realized that that was what I was. I still doubt my creative ability today even though it turns out that my sister and I are both academic and both creative.

One day, Miss Whose Name I Can’t Remember, asked us to put up our hands if we walked from the centre of town, where the buses dropped us, to school. All of us did. ‘So,’ she said, ‘here’s a quiz for you.’ This is the only question I can remember. We walked past a big car showroom, Ford, I think. She asked us if we’d seen the three cars arranged precariously on a display stand. Of course we had; it was difficult to miss them. ‘What,’ she asked us, ‘were on the number plates?’ I had no idea. Every day I walked past them and I never noticed the number plates. She wasn’t interested in the answers. She wanted to illustrate how most of us go around with our eyes shut. I knew they were there but I didn’t see them. (It was something like ‘SEE 1’ ‘LUV 1’ and ‘BUY 1’) Every single day for the rest of my school career I saw those number plates with a sense of shame. If I think now of my walk to school those damn cars and sense of shame is back in an instant.

I still fight with myself to see. It’s tied up with being blind to the things that are there all the time and taking them for granted. One of the things I do very deliberately, though not often enough, is to go to new neighbourhoods so I can see again. I am forced to look.

That’s one of the things I love about going to my jewelry class. On my walk from the underground station, I pass this wonderful spirit house and Bodhi tree. I have no idea of the relevance of the zebras although this site gives some suggestions. I’ve written about spirit houses before here and there’s a great story from Catherine at Women Learn Thai about a visit to the Chao Mae Tiger Shrine here.

A random blog post

So there’s a weakness in my recent “I am going to blog more frequently” plan. Uhm; what to blog about. I’m not doing anything very exciting at the moment. (I am mostly teaching myself Adobe Illustrator at the moment but I trust that won’t fascinate anyone?)

I have a theory though. The only answer to a block is to start doing it anyway: play with your materials, whether they be paint, words or musical notes. What results might not be brilliant but it will gradually break the paralysis. I still needed a subject though so I turned to the internet to tell me what to write about. I googled ‘random blog topic generator’ and lo, there are such things. I opened the first three, here, here and here.

The temptation, indeed the instruction on one of the generators, is to keep pressing the button until you get something you fancy writing about but I thought that might be a bit dangerous. It might not go on infinitely; the generator might suddenly emit a big sigh and stop producing ideas because nothing could please me. So I decided I’d press each of the generators once and then I’d have to choose from one of those topics.

The first one gave me: “One of my favourites is Bagels.” One of my favourite what? And why the capital letter? Is Bagels a place I haven’t heard of? I let out a big sigh and clicked the next tab.

The second one was: “Aristotle’s philosophy” Oh dear. This is somewhat shaky territory. In my dim and distant past is a classics degree. So dim and distant that I can remember almost nothing and Husband has been petitioning me for years to return my degree certificate to the university. Today, though, I search around in my head and ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ appears; my mouth goes dry and I feel a bit faint. I go and have a look at Wikipedia. After consideration I’ve decided that I haven’t forgotten it, I’ve actually suppressed it and for very good reason.

I move on to the third randomly generated topic: “What do you think of your children?” Crumbs. We’re on really hazardous ground with that subject. What I think of my children is that they know how to find my blog and that’s all there is to say on that subject.

Still, I’ve written a blog post huh?