Transformations

by Mirinda Kossoff
www.jewelrybymirinda.com

In my world of jewelry-making, I sometimes finish what looked like a good design in the formative stages and see at the end of the process that I've birthed an ugly baby. I've learned that there is both challenge and opportunity wrapped in my ugly baby: the challenge of figuring out the mechanics of making changes and the opportunity to make a better piece. Sometimes a piece sits around for quite a while before the lights go on, and I realize what my piece needs in order to be finished.

The first piece below I made in a Celie Fago workshop on combining polymer clay with PMC. The resulting piece met all the qualifications but to my eye didn't look quite right. Celie gave us templates and direction for working on the pieces, so they all turned out similarly. Mine, however, didn't nearly approximate the beauty of Celie's original, and honestly, I didn't want to make a copy of Celie's work. I needed to own the piece as mine - my design. So I took out the polymer clay insert and was left with a hole that needed filling.



The piece went through five iterations but unfortunately, I didn't photograph the middle two. My first attempt, which you can see below, was to attach a copper disk with a fine silver design screwed on top.





It didn't work. Something about the hangy down thingy of PMC and copper just wasn't doing it for me. I got rid of that during another attempt to fill the void left by the polymer clay by loading it with tiny labradorite beads and then making a shadowbox (done by adding a lid with a center hole). The only way to affix the beads was to use cyanoacrylate and the result looked blobby, so I burned out the adhesive (outdoors and using a mask to filter the fumes) and of course ruined the gemstones.

So, once again, I'm looking at a hole inside the lovely PMC "drum." I thought for days about how to fill it. I decided, finally, to use pieces of a sea urchin shell that I'd saved for years. I needed to figure out how to hang the pendant, since the original was hung from a sterling wire that went up through the polymer. I decided on a simple bail and soldered the bail I'd fashioned onto the PMC. I patinated some copper and cut out a donut, then drilled two holes and screwed the donut to the PMC back with tiny brass screws. Then I slipped the sea urchin shell inside with some adhesive. The last iteration had the organic look I was going for. Here it is below. The picture below is the back of the pendant. I learned something through each stage of this pendant's transformation, so the time and effort was worth it.

Do you prefer one of the earlier iterations of the piece? If so, why? Or do you agree with me that the last transformation is the best?