Studio Peek

I've committed myself to redoing the studio, slowly but surely, 12 square feet at a time.  I started by converting the grinding bench to a soldering area.  This involved moving around lots of tools and lots of dirt, ick.

Don't worry, I still have a grinding area.
Next, I need to get pegboard to hang many of my hammers and handtools.
Really I want a dust collector, but that will wait a big longer.  It's a major investment and will require a lot of research and quite a few more sales.

Totally unrelated, but I thought I'd show you the big mesh strainer I found at Walmart, that I can use to clean and sort through my tumbler media.  It's about 14 inches long.

I love the large size of it, combined with a small enough mesh to handle the stainless steel shot.  The handles extend to fit over the edges of a standard size kitchen sink.  Of course our shop sink is more of a laundry sink size- oh well.  It also has little feet on the bottom, so it can sit right inside the sink.

Now, what's in progress on my workbench?

I've got some designs laid out to start chasing.  The sunflower design is for a bronze cuff bracelet, a special request.  The hive/house on the right is one of my daughter's drawings, shrunk down to jewelry size. 

I'm interpreting it as a flat chasing.  Here it is in progress.

It's turning out to be much more challenging than I anticipated, both technically and creatively, a different style than what I would usually work with.  I may be doing this two or three times till I get it right.  I will keep you posted on this one.