Artisan Mama: In the works

On Monday I actually had to decide what to make for my first project in Arts Metals. I felt so indecisive, but finally went with my first idea of a spider.

I then had to decide exactly how I wanted to proceed--which items would be cut out of which metal. We were given three pieces of metal and told if we messed them up we'd have to go buy more ourselves. Kind of harsh, but I guess I'll deal with it.

Once I made the decision to do the spider web design, I sketched out exactly how I wanted the project to be:

I decided the background would be the web, and I would make it on the piece of aluminum.

Originally I was going to scratch my spider web onto the metal. But then my professor suggested I pierce and cut it instead. You pierce the metal by drilling a small hole in it. Then you feed your saw blade through the hole so that you can cut the metal. Here is one of my practice tries.

I'm either going to have to get a smaller drill bit, or cut the slit larger so their isn't a big whole at the end of each piece of the web. But we'll just have to see what happens. I'm really excited to try it.

Next, I decided what would be cut out of brass,

And what would be cut out of copper.

And then I cut.

I had a problem with my saw blade being too loose, but once that was fixed it went pretty smoothly. Except for the time I broke my blade, and then put the new one in upside down. Yeah, that made it difficult to saw.

Anyway, by the time I finished cutting out my bug pieces, class was over. Yhe pieces are still very rough, but I like they way they look on top of each other.