Mammoth Ivory Ear Spoons and Sewing Needles

Well, I’m back from my latest trip – to Arizona. I’m down one boyfriend, but up one hobby. With the chaos of my breakup I’ve once again been bad about posting, but here are some images of what I’ve been spending my nervous energy on:

A couple of years ago I purchased a small bag of scrap mammoth ivory cut-offs at Pennsic, a large medieval event. I found the bag of ivory just before I left for Arizona, and I needed to switch things up when I got home, so I picked up some pieces and just started whittling. These are medieval style ear spoons and sewing/embroidery needles. The ear spoons are inspired by the ones shown in this image (from a book of Viking era finds that I have that’s in Russian, so I’m not sure of the details – I need to work on my Cyrillic).

I formed the ivory items using a few simple tools: my pocket knife, a set of small files from Harbor Freight, and an exacto knife (mostly for around the hole because it has a smaller blade than my pocket knife). I’ve already sold the smaller ear spoon, and plan on putting the larger one up for sale on my etsy site. They were fairly fun, if somewhat time consuming, so I’ll probably make a few more. 

On Vintage Furs

I’ve never felt at all morally ambiguous about the use of vintage furs. And really, until I started doing price-checks on-line recently, I had no idea there was such a debate about it. The interesting thing to me is that no one really seems to be mentioning my reason with being happy about using vintage furs:

I feel that like any other resource we use, once animals have been made into furs we should make full use of them rather than letting them go to waste.

I feel this waste-not want-not principle is particularly true in the case of vintage furs. If we’ve killed animals for the use of their furs, I see it as a far worse offense to then waste their deaths by destroying the furs, hiding them, or otherwise making that resource useless and that death meaningless. Yup, that’s my hippy-dippy side coming out. Deal.

Recently I began bidding on lots of vintage furs on auction sites like ebay, largely so that I could enable my friends by making vintage fur available for crafting (I’m involved with a group that does medieval style events, and also some Victorian-esque groups). New fur is often both expensive, and morally problematic, so I like the idea of making a better alternative available. I got the idea after trying to find some fur at an event for some Viking-style hats I was making and having questions raised about the vendors I was purchasing fur from.

After discovering that I could bid on larger lots of fur as long as I was willing to deal with the issue of then having SO MUCH vintage fur around, I decided I just needed to be an enabler, and since I was already selling my glassware at events, bringing some vintage fur finds along too was a natural progression.

The issue that’s come up since then is people wondering if they can get away with wearing some of the nicer vintage pieces in public. Especially because we live in Portland, Oregon, where we had a furrier closed down because of extreme anti-fur demonstrations. Well… I’ve been wearing rabbit fur scarves here for over ten years and have yet to be painted red, but I also don’t lurk outside of furriers’ windows. And maybe my coming out about being ok with vintage fur will change that.

The big argument from PITA against wearing even vintage fur (heck even fake fur) is that if you wear it, people will want to imitate you, and thus buy fur and perpetuate the problem. I would have to argue that re-using vintage fur MORE would help with this because it’s unique looks are different enough from the current trends that it won’t encourage buying new fur off the rack. Making it readily available certainly feels like it’s helping rather than harming – I know I’m buying less new fur, and so are my friends.

I’m not saying you should change your mind and go buy some fur right now, or stop being a vegetarian, or anything like that. But before you automatically judge all fur wearers, think about things a little bit more, and hold back on the drastic vandalism, and consider some issues of respect. And if grandma’s furs are crumpled in a box in the attic, consider at least making sure they get smoothed out and are in a breathable container... because it’s a sad thing to ruin a piece of history.

Of course if you want to buy something, I'd be happy to sell you a vintage fur, on my etsy site or at an event. I'm even considering starting to make items like hats using vintage materials such as fur as components. But you can also go trasure hunting for your own, which can be a lot of fun. If you are looking for a good deal, I suggest going someplace like the Goodwill bins, or if you don't mind waiting for a few months, you can always lurk on ebay, waiting for just the right thing, at just the right price.

There is a LOT of vintage fur out there, it should really be taken care of and given the respect it deserves, rather than shunned and miss-treated. And if it’s in bad condition, think about re-working it and giving it a new life as something someone will love. If many animals died for that stole, make sure that their little lives aren’t just thrown into a dumpster, please. Treat them with the care you would treat any other precious resource. 

New Art! And Cats...

Ok, here they are, what I know you all must have been waiting for, new original artwork!!! There will be both the originals and prints available at Orycon on the weekend of Nov 2-4, in Portland, Oregon. After that I'll have prints up for sale in my etsy store, vandycraft. Here are some pictures of artwork along with their inspirations:

Pumpkin Time!

It's glass pumpkin time again! I keep meaning to update and not getting around to it... so here are a couple teaser pictures of glass pumpkins. And I promise more to come. :-)

Wedding Goblets

This is just a quick post since I’m absolutely exhausted, but I finished the wedding goblets for my friends Sterling and Carey today AND gave them to the couple at the wedding today (yeah, cutting it a bit close, I know), and I wanted to post pictures. I’ll post more about the project later, but these are pretty much miracle goblets. I was sick for three weeks out of the two months I had to make the goblets, the bronze parts had some serious last minute issues, one of the glasses fell out of the base and broke as the glue was drying and got replaced with another goblet top from several years ago that I managed to find on a shelf before the epoxy set, and for all of that I think they are pretty swell. So yay! Hopefully that is a good sign that through thick and thin this couple can make things work out beautifully.

Art!

I keep putting off blogging and I keep saying I’m going to do it… so here I go!

Eventually I plan on transferring my art blog to my website which will be getting a facelift soon: www.vandyhall.com. But for now, it can exist here, even though all of my past entries are terribly out of date.

Here are a couple pictures of a project I’ve been working on recently. It’s mostly done, and I went ahead and photographed it since I needed photos to apply for some scholarships. Allthat’s left to do is to sand blast some imagery and text on the glass vessel. Well, and disassemble and reassemble it of course. And take more pictures. It will be interesting to see how differently I arrange the contents of the glass once there is imagery on it. I originally planned on filling a lot more empty space with images rather than objects or texture. I may risk over doing things at this point, but hey, I have pictures of it now and can rearrange the contents as much as I need to in order to make it work after I do the sand blasting, so it can keep evolving as a work of art.

One of the things I’d like to eventually spend more time blogging about are interesting materials I try out. In the above project I made great use of an interesting two part epoxy resin produced by tap plastics. It’s a two part putty that you knead together and then model like clay. I shaped it over wire armatures. I have several other projects in mind with it and will try to remember to take some in progress pictures. And to actually look up the name of the stuff. One thing I was VERY impressed with was the fact that it was still good. My dad bought me a couple gallon buckets of the stuff as a Christmas present six or seven years ago and it was supposed to have a one year shelf life and it was almost as soft as when I first opened it when I dug it out for this project. At any rate, I promise to come back to this subject with more facts. But TAP Plastics, a seriously cool place!

In addition to making stuff I’m attempting to actually set some goals for myself and get off my butt and send in entries to shows again. I realized a little while ago that I’ve become incredibly lazy when it comes to shows. I’ve pretty much only done the shows that have fallen into my lap in the last several years. Most of my recent work has been commission based and craft or theme driven. But I’ve been really wanting to do more Art. A good way to make this a priority is to make doing more shows a priority. And I actually have some new stuff, probably enough to do a two or three man show even. I was reading a metal art blog where the artist was writing about having a goal of applying to a minimum of 24 shows a year. That seems like both so little and so many all at once. But it also seems like a good goal for me. So I spent some time last night looking through calls for artists and have five on my list so far as possibilities to submit for and am going to keep it up. I’m hoping that writing this stuff in a public forum will also help me live up to my goals…

Well that is plenty for today. I’m spending this weekend working on finishing up a wedding present and the wedding is tomorrow. You know I’ll be doing finishing working until the wee hours in the morning, because that’s how we work, so it’s back to the grind stone for me and I promise pictures after the lucky couple receive their gifts!

Making Medieval Mirrors

Earlier this year at Estrella (a medieval reenactment war that takes place in Arizona in February) I got an inquiry about making some medieval glass mirrors to be placed in 13-15th century style pocket mirror cases. Like many people, I'd never herd of pre-renaissance glass mirrors, so was intrigued by the possibilities. I was spending the three weeks directly after that at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, and had access to their amazing research library. I proceeded to spend most of my non-work days closeted in the library, and a couple of surprised librarians helped me track down information on early glass mirrors.

Much to all of our surprise, it turns out that glass mirrors have been in use just about as long as there has been glass blowing. There are Roman references to producing mirrors from blown glass and tin or lead, and numerous small mirrors (such as the one at the left from Birka) and fragments have been found in Viking era graves.

The basic process of making glass mirrors is pretty simple - you have to put a metallic coating on the glass to make it reflective. Before the amalgamation technique was developed (a process developed in the renaissance requiring the use of mercury to mirrorize flat glass) this was done by blowing a large thin glass globe and pouring molten metal (lead or tin) inside of it while it was still hot. The tricky part comes in letting the glass cool down enough to have the lead or tin (which have a much lower melting point) stick to the glass rather than remain a moving liquid puddle without the glass cracking or popping off of the punty. Once the glass has been mirrorized it's broken free of the punty and allowed to cool and crack without annealing. This is why most pre-renaissance mirrors are also quite small, generally between around 2 and 6 cm.

So far in my experimentation I've managed to make several at least partially successful mirrorized globes, and have cut the fragments of these into viking style mirrors. As I do more experiments, I'm planning on refining the process for more consistent results and then also producing mirrors suitable for mounting in later period medieval pocket mirror cases. I'm also interested in mounting some of these as pendants. There is a reference to a mirror 'wrapped in silver wire' for use as a pendant that was found at Birka, and I would love any images or additional information anyone has on this.