Tripped up Tuesdays Gets a New Name and a New Schedule

Well, it's open!  After approximately 18 months' build up and prep, Naiad Necklaces is ready for business.  I had a crazy couple of weeks moving to the finish line that was not helped at all by the fact that my day-job hours tripled during the same time period.  I made multiple, multiple mistakes those last 2 weeks--all in the interest of generating fresh material for this column, of course!  The most apparent and painful of my mistakes was vastly underestimating how long it would take to write a single listing.  While I got marginally faster (?sloppier?) as I went along, I averaged 45 minutes for each of my 21 inaugural listings. 

It also became apparent that, even though I have lots and lots of material for this column, I don't have lots and lots of time to write it.  I have therefore decided to rename this column "Mistake of the Month Mondays," with a goal of publishing it on the first Monday of every month. Thanks for stopping by.  I'll see you in a month!

Tripped Up Tuesdays: Feeling Uncentered

A slightly off center lapis stone. 

For my first try at bezel setting, this wasn't too bad.  However, you can see that the lapis shifted slightly while I was pushing the bezel sides in.  By the time I noticed, it was too late to fix.











Although I didn't realize it at the time, part of the problem was my tool:

A bezel roller.  Photo courtesy bestjewelrysupply. Ebay user.

This is a fairly standard bezel setter, but I don't have a lot of upper body or hand strength.  Using it, I found that I could only push the bezel sides in a micron at a time.  Typically, you want to firmly push each side of the bezel to form a square that "locks in" the stone.  With my wimpy pushes, I had inadvertently jostled the stone.  I was in a class, and I spent so much time trying to get the first stone set that I took the second bezel and stone home to finish.  Only, I forgot that I didn't have a bezel roller at home.  What I had instead, was this tool:

A used airliner burnishing tool

This tool is a much used burnisher that I purchased on e-bay.  Previously used on airliner innards, it was twice as big as the usual burnisher for sale on e-bay and much too big for my hands--or so I thought. I had nothing else to set the stone, however, so I tried it out.  It was fabulous!  It bent the silver like butter, and I quickly locked the second stone in:

This stone is perfectly centered.  I haven't yet created the rolled edge to give it a finished look

It turns out this large burnisher greatly improved my mechanical advantage.  If you find yourself struggling with bezel rollers, I highly recommend it.  That, and double-checking the position of your stones before it's too late.


Tripped Up Tuesdays: Counting beads didn't help these uneven ends

There are literally hundreds of tiny silk knots between each seed pearl in this necklace.  As I laid out the pattern, I carefully counted each bead to keep the pattern and continuously placed the piece on my beading to tray to confirm the design layout.

 

If you look closely, you can see that the coral/turquoise stations "match up" on the beading tray and end at the same length on each side of the tray

 



Unfortunately, when I went to add the clasp, I saw this:

 

Counting the beads exactly didn't work quite as well as I thought, because each bead is slightly different in size.  I am learning the hard way that jewelry needs to be looked at and measured in multiple dimensions and in multiple ways.  Even two ways isn't enough.  Sure, go ahead and count those beads!  Lay them out in a tray!  But also line the necklace's sides up right next to each other.  Pull the sides taut, and look at them from different angles.

Tripped Up Tuesdays: Setting limits in the blogosphere

A depiction of the blogosphere. Courtesy of gephi_org. Flickr user

    If you have been visiting this blog, first of all, thank you!  I am completely new to social media, and find all of this daunting.  And yet, to support my soon-to-be opened Etsy store, I have created a Facebook business page, Hubpages profile, and Tumblr account. The social medial gurus tell me I should also open Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram accounts, but I just can't quite find the energy yet. So far, each format has had its own set of rules and its own steep learning curve (for me anyway).



Blogger Effort per Week. Courtesy of Zemanta. Flickr user

   Also, you know that social media recommendation of posting 5 times a day to each account?  So not happening.  Instead, I have decided to divide my postings in the following manner:


1.  This Blog.  My goal is to continue posting weekly Tripped Up Tuesdays blogs.  Think of these as a "Mistake of the Week" column--accounts of the "Stupid Stuff I do in the Studio" in hopes that you won't do the same.  When ever possible, I will try to post a remedy to that week's mistake. This is the sort of posting where one really does hope to run out of topics, but sadly, I seem always to have fresh new material.  Right now I offer links to my other blogs on the sidebar, which I update and change weekly.  Soon, however, I hope to organize secondary pages for past Tripped Up Tuesdays posts and for "What I'm Working On" pictures.  I also hope to create a secondary page that will provide brief overviews of my Hubpages posts.

2.  Hubpages.  Longer, magazine-length articles that I hope to post monthly.  Although many of these will be related to jewelry and jewelry making, I am also looking forward to discussing more esoteric topics, such as the economics of playdates. This month's blog gave a short personal tour of other businesses with the name, "Naiad" in them.

3.  Facebook. Uber-brief comments posted 2-3 times a week.  I think of Facebook as a running diary of notable day-to-day experiences; store events (e.g., sweepstakes, flash sales); and fun, interesting news from others.  In my opinion, Facebook is the most user-friendly forum for getting feedback and having a conversation with others in the blogosphere, so I hope you will consider liking my page: I'd love to hear from you!

4. Tumblr. Most people seem to use Tumblr as a photo diary, and that's what I do as well.  I typically post a picture of "What I'm working on now" once a week along with a few tags.  I also repost summaries of content from my other blogs (including this one) as it arises.  I find Tumblr the most mysterious of all my accounts.

There you have it:  My first baby steps into the blogosphere.  I think now I'll go and make a necklace.  See you next week!

Tripped Up Tuesdays: All Gummed Up with Henrietta's Gum Arabic

I love, love, love Henrietta's Gum Arabic, but all too often, I end up wearing the stuff in my lap.  It runs on the spendy side (about $10-$14 per oz) and needs to be mail ordered.  One big spill can result in substantial production delays while I wait for the new stuff to come in.

 

Gum Arabic is a natural gum made from the sap of two Acacia trees: Senegalia senega and Vachellia seyal. Comprised of a natural mixture of edible glycoproteins and polysaccharides, it is used extensively in the food industry as a stabilizer (it reduces the size of bubbles in soda pops) and as a thickener (think gum drops). In watercolor painting, gum arabic acts as a binder, bonding pigments to paper, increasing paints' luminosity, and producing lovely feather effects in water washes.  It is also a weak glue and was the traditional adhesive used on lickable postage stamps and envelopes. One of gum arabic's most remarkable properties is its solubility: it can be completely dissolved in its own volume of cold water. This extreme solubility makes it ideal for beadwork, as spills and dribbles can be easily and completely washed away with just tiny amounts of water. Following Henrietta Virchik, I use the gum to create self-threads of silk and to bind my final knots before sealing.

 

Henrietta Virchik is the author of the classic book, Pearl and Bead Stringing With Henrietta and the developer of Henrietta's Gum Arabic.  After her death in 2001, Henrietta's mentee Suzanne Hye purchased her Beading Supply Company (eventually renaming it "Hye on Beads") and the gum arabic formula. According to Ms. Hye, "I kept [Henrietta's] name on the glue as homage to her. My family continues to make and sell the glue to wholesalers such as Beadsmith and Eurotool." Ms. Hye also sells the glue on e-bay under the name vintagesuzanne, which is where I usually get it.  Ms. Hye's e-bay shop, by the way, is also an excellent source for discontinued Gudebrod silk thread.

 

So what to do about those all-too-common spills?  The jar's wide mouth and relatively high center of gravity make Henrietta's Gum Arabic particularly prone to tipping.  I therefore decided to make a Styrofoam collar to lower its center of gravity.  It was a wonderful inaugural project for my new jeweler's saw!

Just *try* tilting this baby!

Also, if you really get into a pinch, plain old Elmer's glue or painter's gum arabic can be substituted for Henrietta's for considerably lower cost.  Truthfully, any water-soluble glue would work fine for the self-threads.  However, for binding the last knots in a necklace, I recommend using some sort of gum arabic. 

 

 

 

 Tradition and gratitude to Henrietta keep me loyal to her brand, however.  With my new Styrofoam collar, I can now use her gum and not wear it.

 

Tripped Up Tuesdays: Heartbroken!

Although the household baking soda solution and aluminum foil method is one of the safest ways to clean silver jewelry, things get trickier if there are gemstones involved.  Most gemstones do fine in baking soda and water, but the method should be avoided for jewelry set with corals.  For opals and turquoise, there seems to be some controversy over whether saltwater baths are safe with some saying yes and others, no.  I don’t own any opals, so that’s not even on the table, but I do put turquoise in baking soda solutions.  It does fine, but I generally need to re-polish it when I am done.

Today’s piece is a near-antique, heart shaped Chinese Export pendant with, as you can see below, a delicately traced ink painting on ox bone.  What idiot, you might ask, would put *that* in a baking soda solution????  Well . . . given this is a blog about the stupid stuff I do, who do you think? 

I too was worried about the painting’s integrity, but the silver was incredibly tarnished. With all that silver mesh, hand polishing just wasn’t going to clean it well.  I know there are people out there who like their silver well-patinaed, but I’m not one of them.  I decided to carefully place the pendant into a warm (not hot) baking soda solution to a level just below the bone.  Unfortunately, thanks to the miracle of capillary action, all of the solution ended up on top of the bone painting anyway. 

Only, it looked great when I was done!  I mean really great.  The solution had lifted off approximately 100 years of grime and slime, and suddenly the painting looked vibrant and fresh.  Furthermore, by lifting all that grime, the soda solution had uncovered red accents in the painting that were breathtaking.

So  I did it again.  Because all the solution had ended up on top of the painting the first time around, the silver was still tarnished.  Therefore, this time, I didn’t bother with putting in a little bit of water.  I completely covered the pendant and let ‘er rip.  10 minutes later, I got what you see below.  Much paint, including all of the red, had been lifted away.  The ink that was left diffused out of the painting and settled into grooves in the bone.  In a word, I ruined the pendant.

Next time I will either remove the painting first or stick to hand polishing after all.

Tripped Up Tuesdays: The Wrong Trousers!

No, it's not because they're my fat pants (well, they are, but that's beside the point).

The problem is here, with the cargo pocket

Not once did Henrietta Virchick mention that cargo pants were a no-go in her classic book on bead stringing.  But take it from me, you want a smooth, form-fitting pant when you are beading.





Tripped Up Tuesdays: Hacked! "Deal Keeper" is no keeper.

Here's how computers work in our house:  My husband gets a top-of-the-line gaming computer, uses it until it becomes obsolete (here, "obsolete" means "slower than the other guys' computers"), passes it off to me, and gets a new one.  I then use the old computer until he is ready for his next upgrade.  This has worked pretty well for many years, until this year, when the hand-me-down started crashing with every mandatory update, and my husband wasn't yet ready to give up his current computer. 

I now have my very first brand-spanking new computer in over 2 decades! Unfortunately, it came with a little extra "gift."  When I downloaded Google's Picasa, it came bundled with the "Deal Keeper." Whether "Deal Keeper" is actually malware or merely a potentially unwanted program (PUP) is up for debate, but I can tell you that, even though I deleted it within 3 minutes of it's installation, criminals still managed to hack my Facebook page and steal a credit card number based on information that was diverted to them. Also--and this is important--I had *used* the Picasa custom install and had specifically *not* given permission to down load Deal Keeper.  It still downloaded.

as you can see, Deal Keeper clogs your screen, rendering your web browser virtually unusable. Screen capture courtesy Alesya Orlova

 Recommendations and Resources:

• Truth is, I can't live without Picasa.  Maybe you can't either.  If this happens to you, or if Deal Keeper piggybacks on to some other download, I recommend you follow the excellent advice from Stelian Pilici from Malware Tips.
• However, *do not* use Mr. Pilici's links to access the various software programs you need to remove this nasty malware.  Doing so will, ironically, result in other potentially unwanted programs being downloaded. 
• Instead, go directly to each software provider's site, and download the software from there.  The sites are:

              http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
              https://www.malwarebytes.org/
              http://www.surfright.nl/en (for Hitman Pro)

Malwarebytes has just been rated number one for eliminating unwanted malware.  To learn more about how well various software programs performed, go to Patrick Allan's post on lifehacker:

10 Malware Removal Apps Tested, Malwarebytes Comes out on Top



Deal keeper is no keeper.  Kind of like this stinky fish. 
Photo courtesy Rupert Morris March 2007.  Flickr user.