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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1085 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Yearly Hubski Check In.

You know? I'm good.

I was going to do a bunch of yardwork while dealing with COVID but I was dealing with COVID. Which means I'm still here, heart&lung damage documented but recovering. I built a business that not only survived the pandemic but thrived to the point where I've retired from my old job. My daughter made it through a year of distance learning with no ill effects and I've learned things about casting that no one else in the world knows. I've done more than picked up many skills of a lost art, I've developed my own tricks. Enamelwork is rewarding, fulfilling and beautiful and some time next week I'll take possession of a was-six-figures precision CNC mill capable of holding a micron or less. There are things I'm really fucking good at that I didn't even know I'd need to do eighteen months ago and this former foodstamp kid made it to the other side of the roaring economic divide that is going to make life hell for maybe 80% of the world.

Dug up 500 square feet of yard last week. With a hand tiller. Then chipped 2500lbs of sod through the chipper. Still running in the 11s and that not very far but fuckin' hell there are about three million people who didn't make it to 2021 because of COVID so I'n'I gonna count my blessings.





goldbludgeon  ·  1084 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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kleinbl00  ·  1083 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Casting as in metal casting.

Enamel as in "vitreous enamel" or "jewelry enamel." The term "enamel" has been largely debased by general use of any fired ceramic glaze (or in the case of "enamel paint" by anything vaguely hard and shiny) but good'n'proper enamel is ground glass fired to molten temperatures. In archetypal, respectable jewelry, it is always done over pure silver or gold. The artists most responsible for extending the art are all from the Art Nouveau period, notably Henri Vever, Rene Lalique and Peter Carl Faberge.

Enameling itself has suffered mightily as the translucent, heavy metal enamels used in its creation are difficult to acquire compared to the garbage generally used. Not only that but wretched mass-production techniques have dissolved much of the market for actual jewelry enamel. But it's fun, it's easy, it's rewarding, it's meditative and it's repeatable.

This took three hours.

There is much to learn.

goldbludgeon  ·  1082 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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kleinbl00  ·  1081 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh, I'm sellin' just not yet.

I had a watch I liked a bunch, and then the new model sucked. And I have a job that let me surf the Internet a lot, so I got interested in clocks. Then I discovered that building your own clock is something old men do and nobody pays you for, but then i found out that there was a clock repair class nearby, but that they recommended the watch repair class first, at which point i discovered that one of the five watchmaking schools in the world was two exits from my house, and then things snowballed.

I made jewelry before I went to college and then I went to college for mechanical engineering. Frankly if all of my jewelry-making stuff hadn't gotten stolen by Averats my junior year I probably would have been a watchmaker 20 years ago.