Week 1 - Jewelry 3 - Die Forming and Containment

I have been thinking about this project so much this week, I don't even know why. It has been like it has been consuming my thought process. Containers and Containment bring up so many thoughts but it started to make me think of the individual self as a container and as containing your memories and thoughts. Then I thought about thought (what a weird statement), the duality of it. The fact that a memory has this realistic qualities yet there are always these sensory, imaginative aspects of the memory that have been conceived in our brain.

My grandmother died when I was very young, I think I was about 3 years old, this fact I am actually not sure of when she died. I have told myself I was 3, but I have yet to confirm with anyone the exact year and time of her death. I was very young at the time; however, I feel like I knew her so well. I remember her with long black hair that flowed down her back and she always had the scent of wild flowers, she would particularly fill the house with these flowers she called queen anne's lace. She liked to mix match colors and wore crazy combinations that never seemed to actually match up to one another.  The facts of her that I remember are more sensory. I remember the way she used to make me laugh and smile and used to surround herself with sunlight and warmth. She died of liver failure due to reactions of her medications to her dialysis, but before she died she purchased these two small plastic snow globes with white unicorns and green grass bases. When you picked up the snow globe they would play "Somewhere over the Rainbow". My cousin and I each received one of these snow globes after she died. Since that day, I have never thought of her death as a passing, as someone going to heaven, to me she is still here just over the rainbow.

I guess where I am going with all of that is, the reality of the matter is a lot of the memory I have of her is false memory. When she died and when I knew her, she did not have long black her. It was short and a pepper-ish color. She also was not as bright and cheering as I remember, she had been on dialysis since my mother was a child and was in fact pretty sick. I don't remember the dialysis machine that apparently sat in their house. I don't remember the corner it was in even. I just remember the small table behind that chair with the fake plastic christmas tree and the small ornaments. I remember staring at them through the sunlight with the dried flowers around it. The memories I have of her are this combination of reality and false reality. I want to portray that in my container. I want it to have these feel on the outside of the reality of her and the inside this false reality of her "essence". You see what fact of her the the idea of her and when you open it up you see the way I remember her.

In other news....

I have been working hard on making a nice die for my pressings for Tuesday. I want to say it was about 3 or 4 hours worth of work on this die. I know I should have kept it simple because it's only a test, but I learned a ton from the making of this die that I can use to speed up the next one. I also made it in such a way I can make a few adjustments over the next few days to get better outputs if something I don't like is happening with it. I also learned that a lot of my issued with the sawing of the first one was my saw frame, so I have a new one of those coming it. It is really hard to saw straight if you're saw isn't.

I really like this form. I used a template this time (now  what is meant by template), it really made things much easier. I have also learned that you have to watch with the smaller details of the form. I know for a fact that some of the small circles I did to the sides will not come out in the die because they did not saw well. I tried to file them out and it worked to a point, but I think a lot of time would have to be spent in order to get those forms to come out in the press. I think for my final design I need to think about elements like that and other possibly ways to achieve those forms. Maybe I die form the main portion of it and go back in and with chasing add in those small details. I will have to think about that.