Our studio is where we play and where our ideas are hopefully turned into little treasures. As we are always learning, we hope to show you the evolution of our studio over time.
I do have safety procedures when I work at my bench, but sometimes I get a bit careless. As I found out the other day and ended up with a dreadlock in my hair and nearly scalped.
Continue reading There Is A Good Reason For Safety Procedures
As usual, being on a budget, when it came to buying a tile saw I opted to visit the local hardware and see what was on offer.
A little unsure about exactly what I needed, as I hadn’t actually done any sawing of glass with a diamond saw, I looked over the various saws available. Surprisingly, they didn’t have that many, but the price difference was substantial.
Guess what? I chose the cheapest saw and hoped for the best. Things didn’t go quite to plan, but they didn’t work out too bad either.
Continue reading Modifying a Standard Tile Saw for Glass
I used a tumbler for the first time at my last silver smithing class to polish the silver chain link bracelet I made. The tumbler seemed to polish my bracelet so quick.
So I thought that I would do some research when I got home to find out about these tumblers. I spoke to Jeff about the information that I found including methods to polish glass. Jeff became very interested in the tumbler when he reviewed the information on tumble polishing glass as this would make things easier for him as well. So we decided to go ahead and buy one with 2 barrels. This way Jeff could use one only for his glass work and I could use the other .
Continue reading Purchased a Dual Tumbler
A while back I mentioned that we were fortunate enough to purchase, at a very reasonable price, a large lot of Bullseye COE 90 sheet glass from a local business. As you would expect, our immediate problem was where to store it all.
Continue reading At last, new shelving for the glass sheets.
Where to buy your silversmithing tools????? This is a good question, I have found that you can get silversmithing tools at reasonable prices from a couple of websites that are not jeweller suppliers . The only thing is that you do need to pay attention to the description of the tools you are buying and check out if there is any difference between the jeweller suppliers same product.
Continue reading Purchasing Tools For Silversmithing
Just a quick post to show you our cutting station. This is where all of our glass is cut and prepared.
When we started we didn’t have a cutting system and just cut directly on the table. If you look closely you will see a wooden ruler that I screwed to the table as a guide. In addition I used a carpenters square for cutting straight pieces etc. It worked, sort of, but had some failings.
I was endlessly cleaning up glass slivers and chips after cutting and sometimes during. If I didn’t clean it up I found my self laying new glass down on small slivers that I am sure scratched the new pieces, and certainly made the piece unstable. The carpenters square was too heavy and made it difficult to manipulate the glass. It also tended to slide when I was cutting and caused me to go off line.
It became obvious this had to change.
Continue reading The Beetle Bits Glass Cutting Station
This is the first post of what I expect to be many about the evolution of our studio. We are learning so we do expect to be making changes to the studio as we discover what does and does not work for us.
Having said that, we love our studio. It is our new playground and where we spend quite a lot of time here.
You can see we have a dedicated area for cutting and working with glass, another where Ann works with her creations and the kiln is in a separate area, well away from combustible items.
Continue reading Our Studio
This was actually a bigger problem than I expected.
We needed a good sized workbench that was very solid and sturdy, and at the right height. The sizes was important because we needed enough room to have the cutting station but also area for project setup, kiln shelf preparation, general design work and what ever else came up. Room in the studio wasn’t a real big issue, but we had to consider future improvements and decided not take up too much space.
Continue reading Our Budget Workbench
Not sure if anybody is really interested, but thought I would post a little about building our studio. By the way, please excuse the photos. They were taken with an old iPhone.
The studio is for working with glass, as in glass fusing, glass slumping and glass draping. It is also a work area for Ann working with silver, copper and other metals. She has another area in the house for more assembly work to do with jewellery and other crafts.
Continue reading Building our Studio