This Always Happens...

I don’t know how this always happens! I start out thinking that I’ll just sew on a few little pearls here and there for small accents...but then somehow it’s hundreds of pearls and hours later, and I’m still doing it!

Evolution of the Wax Tuvstarr Crown, Backwards

Before it was cast in Sterling Silver. This crown was a one of a kind wax sculpture, which I hand-built, carved, constructed, melted, cut, and joined out of soft injection wax, over the course of 200 hours. I free-styled the construction, meaning that I worked straight from my imagination and instincts, without a drawing or a planned design. I let the crown evolve and grow itself under my tools from hour to hour, day to day, week to week.

The soft pink injection wax is a good medium for this type of construction, even though technically it’s not formulated for carving or sculpture. It’s designed for injecting very fine and highly detailed molds, with a very low melting point and low viscosity.

But I found that these same characteristics that make soft pink wax bad carving, tend lend themselves really well to my sculpting style and methods, as I seem to have a fixation on making tiny granulation spheres. Most of my work, both metal and textile, features hundreds or thousands of spheres.

I was very nervous about this crown coming out in casting, as there is always a danger of losing a one of a kind piece, worth hundreds of hours of work, during the very last stage of production. Variables such as air bubbles, metal impurities, centrifugal force and temperature fluctuations, can easily ruin a metal cast and destroy everything you built.

It’s always exciting to hold the final, finished metal cast in my hand and know that this object that used to be nothing more but a thought in my head, is now a physical object.

It went from an electrical impulse in my brain, to being a material presence in the universe... quite literally a dream come true, and that’s pretty magical to me!