HelloGiggles: Item of the Day

Alessandra Rizzotti just wrote up Millennium General Assembly for HelloGiggles.com. I am psyched!

Player for a player

I bought these plaques for not very much money, maybe ten bucks. I thought I might use them in an assemblage one day; I didn't know how. I just loved the graphics.

At first I thought these plaques were from a metronome but the text* on
the piece from the upper left reveals them to be from a player piano.

Since then, I started cutting up tin and making pieces with it. Now there are tin snips and files and shears at hand. And when I started making a necklace for a friend who's a stellar guitarist, Jane Getter, searching through my cabinets for pieces to assemble, I came across the player-piano plaques and realized I could actually make a necklace from them.

Largo,  slowest<--------------> fastest, Presto

The thick brass was harder to cut than tin (thinner steel) but I managed with my new German shears. I filed off the sharp edges and shaped the treble clef. 

The volume control was already banner-shaped, but the brass was thinner,
so I cut a piece of vintage tin to back it with and riveted the pieces together.

I think it turned out great. Now where do I find more player-piano plaques?

*Standard Artist-Record Action is specially constructed to play any make of reproducing or regular music roll with transposer lever at normal.

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naming things

I suppose it'll get harder as time goes by, naming things, finding some trope to associate with the name or piece of jewelry. Now, since I just made a trio of love-token necklaces and am faced with naming them, I thought to use the initials on the tokens as a correlative device and am sitting here surrounded by poetry anthologies, searching the indexes of first lines for three words that match the initials.

This may be a dumb, not to mention extremely time-intensive, idea. Especially for three initials. Two initials are more doable. One is too easy...it becomes more like picking a word at random. So far, for the token SJP/SPJ/PJS/PSJ/JSP/JPS, I've hit upon "primrose, salutations..." The third word should begin with a J, but it's "miry." So, I think to myself, Maybe two will do, and I go to the page the poem is on.

I laugh. Of course, given the way my weekend has been going, it's a Sylvia Plath poem; what else would be there on page 1416, attached to those words? And the next? "miry skull of a half-eaten ram." Um, okay, who would want to wear that around her neck? Well, maybe plenty, but not me. 

"Here. Here's your necklace."

Sorry; have a unicorn chaser...

Postscript: Mike was standing in the kitchen, making me a brown-rice quesadilla, because he's sweet like that, and he asked me what I was working on.

"A blog post."

"What about."

"A bloody ram's head."

"Is there a picture?!"

"Yes. But I put another picture below it to get that picture out of your head. But it's gory, too."

"Why would you do that? I don't think I'll be able to read it. What's the title?"

"Naming Things."

"Maiming Things?!!"

"No, naming things."

"Whew. I thought I was gonna have to tell people my wife started a blog called Maiming Things."

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say hello to Alma and Ben, earrings

antique assemblage earrings

I'm not sure what I will call this pair, maybe Alma & Ben. They were described as love tokens in the auction I won, but they look more like they were cut from some other existing piece of silver, since there is cutwork on the backs. At any rate, they're silver. And the coral bits are coral, originally from an antique necklace that belonged to my grandmother. The string disintegrated, so I've had this box of coral pieces with drilled holes, thinking I'd eventually use them for something, and lo and behold: Alma & Ben.

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I Love Cowpokey Things

So I made a necklace full of cowpoke charm...and charms: a tiny damascene pocket knife, a sheriff's star, a red ryder lucky coin, a goldstone horseshoe ring, a rifle, a bronco rider waving his hat in the air.

Head 'Em Up, Move 'Em Out - necklace - antique vintage assemblage

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Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer - necklace - antique vintage assemblage

Dedicated to the wild blue yonder, this necklace has incorporated two sets of wings: one a WWII Air Corps collar pin and the other a 1939 Captain Midnight Flight Patrol premium collectable from Skelly. At the focal, set in a filigreed locket frame is a vintage stamped and etched metal button depicting a prop plane over an undulating sea with an arc of stars overhead.

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Dog Tags of the Canine Kind - 1917 to 1964

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The Wares

I'm running out of hangers; somebody buy something.

The dog is not for sale.

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Defining a Moment

I took a couple of pieces in to work today. I'd asked Brandon if I could shoot him wearing them. Brandon is not only cute, he's an absolutely wonderful person. Enough good things cannot happen to Brandon fast enough. Here's Brandon wearing Sundry Dangles and Far Pavilions. That has a nice ring to it, huh? Or does it sound like a cologne? Hey, have you seen that cologne commercial with the guy on a boat, then on a white horse? He says at the end, "I'm on a horse." It kills me. Normally, I never see commercials because of TiVo, but we're transitioning to high-def; we have the TV now, but not the recorder, so we watch things live sometimes to experience the def. My photos of Brandon could definitely use more def. But isn't he swell?

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Drinking the Stars - necklace - antique vintage assemblage

This unusual pendant, suspended from several vintage brass chains, is an antique belt buckle with the buckle teeth and bar removed. In place of the bar, I engineered a wire holding a fabulous antique black glass star and brass button. The necklace went through several false starts until I felt it was balanced, comfortable and pleasing to the eye.

The chain is 15.5 inches (31-inch circumference). The buckle and button are 3.5 inches. The chain and  button dangle at the back of the neck are 4.25 inches.

I scour garage sales, auctions, stores and my life for antique and vintage components that I use in creating one-of-a-kind pieces.

COMPONENTS

• fancy antique cut steel and gold vermeil (?) belt buckle
• 4 superb antique metal buttons
• Art Nouveau square chain from Hayward tie clip
• 3 other kinds of brass chain

****

"Invention"  —Barbara Hamby

I am personally indebted to antiquity because if it were left

to me nothing would have been invented. We would still be chasing

boars and clubbing them to death. No, that's too refined.

We'd still be eating grass and grubbing for worms.

How did they think up all that stuff? I'm not talking

about painting or literature. That's easy.

What could be more natural than sitting around a campfire

telling stories and then rhyming to make them easier to remember

or having two or three people take different parts?

Voila, poetry and theatre. I'm talking about bread.

Who thought of grinding wheat and mixing it with mold?

Forget bread. I can't get past wheat. Wheat must have been a weed

once. Who walked up to wheat and thought about growing

a whole field of it, picking it, smashing it together,

adding water, throwing it on a fire? Who were these

proto-chemists, these Neanderthal Marie and Pierre Curies

who harvested the grain?  To leap from throwing rocks at birds

and grilling them on a spit to Safeway is too great for me,

which leads to another subject if one picks up reading material

in supermarkets. Recently I discovered that alien civilizations

do not vacation on Earth anymore because we are too bellicose

and vulgar. Well, whose fault is it anyway? Anyone who thinks

that buffoons such as we could have thought up wheat,

not to mention architecture, axels, armor, artillery

is not taking his Lithium. There would still be about 250 of us

in caves somewhere in France if someone with big silver eyes

hadn't been buzzing around the universe, bored, sentimental,

and decided to stop and help us along. Next thing you know

there's agriculture, horticulture, apiculture. It's the only

logical explanation and if it weren't for the CIA,

everyone would agree with me. However, scientists in Russia,

Argentina, and the north of England (top-notch men,

every one of them) theorize that not only did the Andromedans

show us a few tricks, they also mated with the indigenous

species. Yuck, you might say, if they think we're creepy now,

just imagine what our manners were like ten or twenty thousand

years ago, though come to think of it, I doubt the alien haute

bourgeoisie was patrolling the outer reaches of the universe.

According to a test devised by these scientists, you can tell

if you are descended from extraterrestrials by certain physical

characteristics, such as blond hair, slender fingers,

musical ability (especially singing), big eyes, blue eyes,

which all point to a racially pure colony in Sweden

or Schleswig-Holstein for a few thousand years

and are somewhat reminiscent of our recent troubles in Europe

and Japan. I, for one, would like to toast an inventor:

Tchin, tchin, Dom Perignon, who said when he discovered

champagne, "My God, I am drinking the stars."

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Coin of the Realm - in honor of tax day

Gunmetal coin lockets, or sovereign holders, like these were popular in the early 20th century and may have been used as watch fobs or hung from chatelaines.


COMPONENTS

• antique (early 1900s) gunmetal sovereign/coin-holder locket
• 1907 Indian-head penny
• antique (early 1900s) steel and brass watch key
• antique (late 1800s) cut-steel button
• new and vintage chains: antiqued copper circle-links chain (lead safe and nickel safe); 100-percent oxidized brass rollo chain made in U.S., small vintage brass chain
• brass connecting rings, which I used to embellish the circle-links chain

The necklace chain is 33 inches. The coin locket is 1.25 inches. There is a small bit of surface rust on the locket, but it's solid: The catch works and the hinge is sound. The necklace slides over the head; there is no clasp on the main chain.

*****

Coin of the realm: The currency that, for any culture, holds value.


Sam Spade: Ten thousand? We were talking about a lot more money than this.
Kasper Gutman: Yes, sir, we were, but this is genuine coin of the realm. With a dollar of this, you can buy ten dollars of talk. —The Maltese Falcon


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