This book, in it sixth edition, has evolved over the years into a complete guide to the metalcasting of sculpture. Potratz (Ironwain) has taken his years of knowledge gained practicing and teaching his craft and is now sharing it all in this easy-to-use book. Contents include: Introduction to Metal Casting, Recommended Tools and Equipment, Safety, Pattern Making, Sprueing and Venting Wax, Intro to Molding, Melting and Pouring Metal, Chasing, and Patina of Metals. Includes a comprehensive bibliography; an appendix filled with useful conversions, charts, recipes, and cupola/cupolette furnace building specs; detailed index; and much more.

Silversmithing for Jewellery Makers is a lusciously illustrated book that offers an authoritative, inspirational insight into the art and craft of silver jewellery making for today's artisan. Now updated with new information, project inspiration and profiles of renowned jewellers, this remains the go-to book on silver jewellery making. Covering all the main skills, treatments and techniques, this comprehensive guide leaves nothing out. From soldering to engraving, every technique is explained with a detailed overview, followed by a carefully-illustrated step-by-step tutorial. Traditional techniques such as filigree are examined alongside contemporary designs and profiles of world-renowned jewellers, updated in this edition to also feature Cynthia Eid, Regine Schwarzer and Ute Decker. A treasure trove of useful tips and information, the book also includes extensive sections on materials, tools and health and safety. An invaluable resource for professionals, a must-have guide for beginners and a unique source of inspiration for all levels of jewellery makers and designers, this book guarantees a strong position on the backlist.

Turn an ordinary piece of wood into a fire-burned masterpiece! If you're a crafter or an artist looking for something new and different, try pyrography. With this type of art, you use a heated instrument to burn images and words into wood. By using techniques from drawing, such as shading and stippling, you can also add depth and embellishments to your creations. It's easy to get started with pyrography--and Creative Woodburning can help you jump into this hot new craft. This book features: * An introduction to pyrography and the tools you need to get started * Expert advice on how to choose the right materials and how to create a safe working environment * 20 projects, including a jewelry box, a cutting board, a wooden egg, a clock, and a gourd birdhouse * More than 180 patterns--from animal and nature designs to borders and geometric and decorative shapes * Techniques for shading, adding color, and sealing your projects The power of your pyrography imagination is just between your fingertips and Creative Woodburning can help you tap into your inspiration. Even if you've never done burning of any kind before, pyrography expert Bee Locke can show you a safe yet fun way to play with fire.

There has never been a display like it. This is the catalogue to an ambitious exhibition at the Goldsmiths' Hall, London, which will comprise 250 gold and silver objects and sets of objects spanning the history of the Church from the earliest possible times to the present day. A foreword by the Rt Revd Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and twelve essays by distinguished authorities will illustrate aspects of evolving liturgy and Church history such as the medieval Mass, Church patronage in the Middle Ages, and the English Reformation. Historical themes from post-Reformation centuries will include Catholic recusancy, the 17th- and 18th-century altar service and the medieval revivals that mirrored the Victorian Tractarian movement. Important commissions from the 1980s and 1990s for Lichfield Cathedral and York Minster will also be discussed. Essays will be accompanied by new photography of key objects, many of them the'secret' treasure of individual parish churches. The guiding principle of the exhibition is that all loans be in the possession of the Church or other religious foundations. Objects have been selected from cathedrals, Oxford colleges and'royal peculiars' such as St George's Chapel at Windsor. The majority are from parish churches great and small up and down the country.

The saw is one of the most basic tools and tends to be taken very much for granted. Many hours and much effort can be saved, and more accurate work produced, if the user has the knowledge of how his saw works and how to keep it in good condition. In this book Ian Bradley provides detailed guidance on the use and maintenance of all types of saw, both hand and mechanical, from the humble junior hacksaw to circular and bandsaws, in the comprehensive and succinct manner that has made him such a respected writer on workshop matters.

This title features 25 step-by-step practical ideas for hand-crafted tinwork projects. The beauty of tinwork is celebrated in inspirational and practical projects. It offers step-by-step instructions for 25 original projects, including a photograph frame, Christmas decorations and an ornate spice rack. It offers comprehensive guidance with expert technical instruction at every stage. It shows examples in a gallery of the finest tinwork from contemporary craft artists, representing the varied styles that can be achieved with this exciting craft. It features over 250 specially commissioned photographs. An expert introduction covers techniques, materials and all the equipment you will need. The appeal of tin lies as much in its usefulness and practical applications as in its subtle tone and malleability. This book fully explores the different techniques used today, through 25 traditional and contemporary tinwork projects, all shown in step-by-step photographs. Among the projects are delicate decorative pieces, such as ornate incense holders and an embellished picture frame, and utilitarian objects such as a lunch box made out of tin cans and an oil-drum barbecue. The section on basic techniques covers cutting tin, decorative techniques such as punching, embossing and soldering, and choosing the best materials for the job. A gallery of work by contemporary designers provides further inspiration, and represents the varied styles that can be achieved using this exciting craft. Illustrated with over 250 photographs, the book provides comprehensive instruction for newcomers to the craft, and will inspire the more experienced to experiment and develop the full potential of the medium.

An indispensable guide to beads and beading techniques, presenting essential beading know-how together with a wide range of inspirational projects, tips and ideas. Beads are the oldest and most widespread art form, having been used in virtually every culture since ancient times. Over the years new materials and methods of making beads have been introduced and now bead workers have a vast array of stunning beads to work with. Beading has also developed over the years and, even though many traditional techniques are still popular, the craft is constantly evolving. With so many techniques, and such a vast array of beads and materials available for the contemporary beader, there is definitely a need for a comprehensive guide. The Beading Bible is just that - an encyclopaedia of beads and beading techniques that aims to educate and inspire anyone who loves working with beads. The Beading Bible begins by looking at beads themselves; how to choose beads from metal, modelled, gemstone, seed beads and cylinder beads to hex beads, crystals, glass and bugle beads. There are handy tables to help you to understand how beads are measured and bead quantities, as well as advice on choosing bead colours. You are then guided through the basic to more specialist tools and equipment that you will need in beadwork. You will find each beading technique explained in detail throughout the chapters. However, the book begins by giving you the basic knowledge of essential techniques, such as working from a chart and knotting. The book is divided into eight chapters that cover all the traditional techniques: bead loom weaving, off loom bead stitches, ropes and cords, fringing, netting and tassels, threading and stringing, wire work and jewellery techniques, bead embroidery and even knitting and crochet with beads. Within each chapter you are guided through the basic skills, tools and materials, before tackling more advanced techniques. Inspiration pages will give you interesting ideas using the different techniques, and there are over 30 fabulous projects, ranging from beautiful bags and jewellery to stylish scarves and accessories - perfect excuses for trying out your new skills! Easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions, clear diagrams and stunning photography combine to create the must-have resource for beaders of all abilities.

India, Jewels that Enchanted the World presents for the first time the remarkable history and unique legacy of 500 years of Indian jewellery, from the 17th century to the present. The essays, all written by leading international scholars, explore the rich, distinctive, and unique heritage of Indian jewellery; the striking boldness of South Indian ornaments; the delicate refinement of the Mughal period; the dazzling jewels of the post-Mughal maharajas; the cross-cultural influences between Europe and India in the 19th and early 20th centuries; and the creations of leading contemporary designers whose jewels display the enduring beauty of Indian design and craftsmanship. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the State Museums of the Moscow Kremlin organised jointly with the Indo-Russian Jewellery Foundation, this lavishly illustrated catalogue brings together royal, ceremonial, and personal Indian jewels to showcase the entire range and variety of the jeweller's art in India.

Analysing the decorative programmes of the most opulent European palaces of the time, Margaretha Rossholm Lagerloef investigates how meaning was conveyed through display and visual effects. She explores the visual meaning inherent in the scheme of spatial relations; in effects of scale, perspective, lighting, figures' positions and postures; and in relations among image types. The analysis concerns the interrelations of various kinds of images in the ensembles; the relations between images and physical site; and the address to the beholder. Lagerloef considers the visual impact of the imagery in conjunction with 'readable' or symbolically 'coded' meanings; thus, the study does not merely subject these decorations to formalist aesthetic principles. She shows the visual meaning generally to sustain the verbal or readable messages, but often in subtle ways, extending or elaborating the meaning. Occasionally, the visual meaning comes forth as an undercurrent or complication, deviating from the proclaimed and symbolic meaning. Fate, Glory, and Love in Early Modern Gallery Decoration contributes to the body of scholarship on visual rhetoric and on how images 'act' out their messages.

Georgian Dublin is synonymous with a period of unprecedented expansion in the market for luxury goods. At a time when new commodities, novel technologies and fashionable imports seduced elite society, silver enjoyed an established association with gentility and prestige. Earlier studies have focused predominantly on the issue of style. This book considers the demand for silver goods in Georgian Ireland from the perspectives of makers, retailers and consumers. It discusses the practical and symbolic uses of silverware, interpreted through contemporary guild accounts, inventories, trade ephemera and culinary manuscripts. For the first time the activities of Dublin's goldsmiths and their customers are considered in the context of the British Isles, acknowledging Dublin's 'second city' status in relation to London. How did the availability of new products like English porcelain and Sheffield Plate affect the demand for silver in Dublin, and how did silver imports from London affect the Dublin trade? To what extent do the practices of Dublin goldsmiths mirror their North American counterparts seeking to infer associations with the fashionable metropolis of London? Drawing on an extensive range of documentary and object evidence this wide-ranging analysis considers the context in which silver goods were made, used, valued and displayed in Georgian Ireland.

This concise guide has all the information you need to successfully makeyour ownjewelry using knotting techniques. Clear, step-by-step, fully illustrated instructions show you exactly how to knot between beads and attach various types of clasps and finishes. The book also explains how to evaluate, select, and care for pearls and gemstones; how to select findings and tools; the pros and cons of silk versus nylon stringing material; and more."

The nineteenth century - the Era of the Interior - witnessed the steady displacement of art from the ceilings, walls, and floors of aristocratic and religious interiors to the everyday spaces of bourgeois households, subject to their own enhanced ornamentation. Following the 1863 Salon des refuses, the French State began to channel mediocre painters into the decorative arts. England, too, launched an extensive reform of the decorative arts, resulting in more and more artists engaged in the production and design of complete interiors. America soon followed. Present art historical scholarship - still indebted to a modernist discourse that sees cultural progress to be synonymous with the removal of ornament from both utilitarian objects and architectural spaces - has not yet acknowledged the importance of the decorative arts in the myriad interior spaces of the 1800s. Nor has mainstream art history reckoned with the importance of the interior in nineteenth-century life and thought. Aimed at an interdisciplinary audience, including art and design historians, historians of the modern interior, interior designers, visual culture theorists, and scholars of nineteenth-century material culture, this collection of essays studies the modern interior in new ways. The volume addresses the double nature of the modern interior as both space and image, blurring the boundaries between arts and crafts, decoration and high art, two-dimensional and three-dimensional design, trompe-l'oeil effects and spatial practices. In so doing, it redefines the modern interior and its objects as essential components of modern art.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, holds stunning examples of jewellery and metalwork from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exceptional period of design covers the neo-Gothic and historicist designs of the mid- to late nineteenth century, the groundbreaking work of British Arts & Crafts designers, sinuous curves influenced by the European Art Nouveau movement and the structural modernity of the 1930s. The collection contains jewellery by some of the finest historicist designers, including the Castellani and Giuliano families and John Brogden, as well as a spectacular decanter by William Burges. There are important pieces of jewellery and silver by the most famous of Arts & Crafts designers, including C.R. Ashbee, Henry Wilson, Gilbert Marks and John Paul Cooper. Unique pieces designed by the artist Charles Ricketts hold a special place in the history of queer art in Britain, having been designed for his friends Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, a couple known collectively as Michael Field. Modernist silver is represented by leaders of the field Omar Ramsden and H.G. Murphy. This beautifully illustrated volume reproduces 70 of the Museum's most important pieces from this period, many previously unpublished, with comparative illustrations of some of the original designs. Importantly, the book is arranged chronologically by designer and includes biographies, a description of their work and how it changed over time, as well as commentary about the specific works in the Museum's collection. The resulting book therefore brings together for the first time the Fitzwilliam's exceptionally fine holdings of jewellery and metalwork from this highly popular and fruitful period of design.

This is a detailed study of the illustrations to Amir Khusrau's Khamsah, in which twenty discourses are followed by a brief parable, and four romances. Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) lived the greater part of adventurous life in Delhi; he composed in Persian, and also in Hindi. From the point of view of manuscript illustration, his most important work is his Khamsah (Quintet'). Khusrau's position as a link between cultures of Persia and India means that the early illustrated copies of the Khamsah have a particular interest. The first extant exemplar is from the Persian area in the late 14th century, but a case can be made that work was probably illustrated earlier in India.

Jennifer Way's study The Politics of Vietnamese Craft uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of American cultural diplomacy, in which Vietnamese craft production was encouraged and shaped by the US State Department as an object for consumption by middle class America. Way explores how American business and commerce, department stores, the art world and national museums variously guided the marketing and meanings of Vietnamese craft in order to advance American diplomatic and domestic interests. Conversely, American uses of Vietnamese craft provide an example of how the United States aimed to absorb post-colonial South Vietnam into the 'Free World', in a Cold War context of American anxiety about communism spreading throughout Southeast Asia. Way focuses in particular on the part played by the renowned American designer Russel Wright, contracted by the US International Cooperation Administration's aid programs for South Vietnam to survey the craft industry in South Vietnam and manage its production, distribution and consumption abroad and at home. Way shows how Wright and his staff brought American ideas about Vietnamese history and culture to bear in managing the making of Vietnamese craft.

This volume brings together a cross-disciplinary group of anthropologists, researchers of craft, and designer-makers to enumerate and explore the diversity and complexity of problem-solving tactics and strategies employed by craftspeople, together with the key social, cultural, and environmental factors that give rise to particular ways of problem solving. Presenting rich, textured ethnographic studies of craftspeople at work around the world, Craftwork as Problem Solving examines the intelligent practices involved in solving a variety of problems and the ways in which these are perceived and evaluated both by makers and creators themselves, and by the societies in which they work. With attention to local factors such as training regimes and formal education, access to tools, socialisation and cultural understanding, budgetary constraints and market demands, changing technologies and materials, and political and economic regimes, this book sheds fresh light on the multifarious forms of intelligence involved in design and making, inventing and manufacturing, and cultivating and producing. As such, it will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, and cultural geography, as well as to craftspeople with interests in creativity, skilful practice, perception and ethnography.

Mary Greensted tells the story of the birth and development of the Arts and Craft movement in Britain with the help of numerous illustrations showing the buildings, furniture, metalwork, and the people who influenced it. The movement was concerned with the revival of traditional crafts, and a return to the vernacular, and it had socialist ideals at its heart. This movement, which flourished in the early twentieth century, has not only bequeathed us with a wealth of fine objects and buildings, but also a way of thinking about life and craft that continues to influence many today.
Contains information on dozens of designers, artists, architects and thinkers, including:
William Morris
CFA Voysey
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
AH Mackmurdo
CR Ashbee
Ernest Gimson

There's never been a better time to be an amateur space explorer! From high school programs designed to send real student-led experiments to the International Space Station, to building a working VTVL (vertical take off, vertical landing) model rocket like the one from SpaceX, this issue is packed full of projects with actual space applications. And if a space aesthetic is more to your liking for your earthly abode, we've got a giant light-up full moon to hang on your wall and desktop orreries to simulate the movement of the planets around the sun. Plus 38 more great projects: Program a bot that points to the ISS when overheadLearn to laser-cut EVA foam to customize any cosplay creationBuild a light-up acrylic rainbow that changes colors to tell the weatherMake a cardboard camera that uses sun prints for filmAnd much more!

Designed for crafters, puzzle lovers, and pattern designers alike, Crafting Conundrums: Puzzles and Patterns for the Bead Crochet Artist provides methods, challenges, and patterns that offer a springboard for creative exploration. All are illustrated with beautiful color diagrams and photographs. Experienced bead crochet crafters looking for a project may choose to skip ahead to the pattern pages and begin crocheting from an abundance of unique, mathematically inspired designs. Those wishing to design their own patterns will find many useful tools, template patterns, and a new methodology for understanding how to do so even without using math. Puzzle lovers without previous knowledge of bead crochet will also find ample inspiration for learning the craft. The first part of the book describes the basic requirements and constraints of a bead crochet pattern and explains what makes designing in this medium so tricky. The authors present their new design framework and offer insight on how best to approach design choices and issues unique to bead crochet. The second part presents a series of bead crochet design challenges informed by colorful bits of mathematics, including topology, graph theory, knot theory, tessellations, and wallpaper groups. Each chapter in this section begins with a design puzzle accompanied by an introduction to the mathematical idea that inspired it. The authors then discuss what made the challenge difficult, present some of their solutions, and describe the thinking and ideas behind their approach. The final part contains nearly 100 original bead crochet patterns, including solutions to all the design challenges. This part also provides a tutorial on the fundamentals of bead crochet technique. Behind the deceptively simple and uniform arrangement of beads is a subtle geometry that produces compelling design challenges and fascinating mathematical structures. In color throughout, Crafting Conundrums gives both math enthusiasts and crafters an innovative approach to creating bead crochet patterns while addressing a variety of mathematically inspired design questions. Supplementary materials, including demo videos, are available on the book's CRC Press web page.