vessels

I have love for vessels. A whole shelf in my tiny kitchen is stacked with hand thrown bowls, gathered from art fairs and shops. My collection of cups, baskets, and wooden spoons spills out of the kitchen and into every other room of our apartment. It would only follow that this soft concave form would find a place in my metalwork. I’m quite delighted with a new addition to my tools: a dapping set, comprised of a 2” square block covered in half circles, with twenty-four steel punches with ball ends. A flat piece of metal is placed in a cup in the block, and the corresponding punch is hammered into the metal, gradually shaping the piece into a hemisphere.

After playing a bit with scrap metal (shown in the image above), I combined one of the small 3/8” diameter recycled sterling silver cups with a small handmade copper bead and a curling ear wire. The finished piece is around 1.5 inches long and beautiful worn front or back.