"bang on shit with a hammer" class continues apace.

Turns out if you alternate bludgeoning with blowtorching you can turn a disk of metal into a cup of metal. Of course, out in the real world we do this with a hydraulic press and a die and do it several times a second.

In "bang on shit with a hammer" class it's a little slower.

I can decrease the radius of my "vessel" by about 3/32" of an inch every half an hour. That's "blast it until the flux melts", "soak the flux off of it because it was only there to keep you from turning it into slag", "bang on it once around", "bang on it twice around", "bang it smooth with a rawhide mallet", "measure your pitiful progress", "coat with flux" and repeat. "Soak the flux off of it" is a 5-minute rest period. I started with a six-inch disc. I now have a cup with a diameter of about 3 1/2 inches. You do the math. I'd like that cup to have an upper diameter of about an inch and a half. Kindly do the math again.

Here's where it gets offensive: I decided that since I was going to be spending the better part of a month beating the shit out of something with a hammer, and since my instructor observed that every studio you go to has these shitty-ass copper cups that everyone hates because nobody enjoys raising but everyone has to do it so we all hang onto these ugly beat-to-shit copper cups forever, that I wouldn't make mine out of copper. I got some goddamn fine silver. Hundred twenty bucks worth. Know what? You can move silver faster than copper. And you can enamel on it. And enamel on silver is Faberge, not some shitty beat-to-shit copper cup that you keep your pencils in.

What's offensive about that, you ask? Well apparently if you spend $10 on something you're going to hammer on for a month and then keep forever, you're an artist. $120? You're Donald J. Trump. The amount of side-eye I'm getting for working precious metal is fucking mystifying, especially considering we were forced to spend three hours watching an "expert" who makes his "living" doing what? Banging on silver.

My materials cost is fully 1200% higher than anyone else's but also less than $40 a week. Yet here I am, traitor to the proletariat.

But wait! There's more! See, if you're a true artist you use Thompson enamel because it's grainy, it's shitty, it's opaque and it looks like ass.

I did this once. I have enamel samples that are shitty, opaque and look like ass. When I inquired about this I was told "oh, yeah if you're serious about this you use Japanese enamel and you wash it in distilled water and it looks dope."

So I said "Okay, I can buy twelve colors of Japanese enamel for a dollar each, I'ma do that and see what it looks like because watchmakers use nothing but Japanese enamel because lead and cadmium and other delicious snacks." But apparently nobody was expecting me to call their bluff so we've gone from "oh yeah you'd love enameling if only you had decent materials" to "oh shit make sure you only do that on Friday and don't tell anyone and keep it under the fume hood Daddy Morbux".

Materials cost? $132. Jewelry class.

The utter defensiveness of this poverty mentality blows my mind. You can't play bingo for $132 a month and I'm a race traitor or some shit because I want to make pretty things in jewelry class. The self-reinforcement is the thing that really gets me - it's not "fuckin'A, you go gurl" it's "are you sure you want to draw the ire of The Man by stepping above your class? Oh wait - maybe you aren't really one of us! I got a river of grief last year for mauling the shit out of a sacrificial component that you buy six for a dollar. I said "sorry, that seemed unavoidable, here's twenty bucks for the student fund 'cuz I'm going to mosh the shit out of more of them and want to do it with a clear conscience" and that caused awkwardness. I donated about eight pounds of chain (that I bought for $5) and everybody has been using it on everything for like nine months and isn't that great but when I say "you just gotta buy the stuff used" they look at me funny. It's like "chain is hard to make therefore it's valuable" but also "chain is made by a machine therefore I'm guilty if I use it" but also "since I didn't pay for this chain I can use it without losing my virtue" but also "but it's machine-made chain brought to us by the rich dude therefore I should feel guilty".

I had to buy $2200 worth of tools for CNC class. So did everyone in the class. I guess people just sucked that one up because they weren't staring down a future of selling trinkets on Etsy for beer money. But maybe if they worked in real materials they wouldn't have to sell trinkets on Etsy for beer money. It's this vicious cycle of bullshit that grinds my gears. Now if you'll excuse me, I might be able to decrease the diameter of my cup by 9/16" if I hurry.