I left with John on the motorcycle in the rain. It rained all night and was still raining in the morning. No problem, that is what raincoats are for… First stop was at Made’s to look at my silver earrings and another 50 copper pendants (the first batch which is already on my website came from a different village). They all looked really good… Made is better at following the subtle distinctions of my designs. Made’s items are not polished yet so you will have to wait to see them. He will be done on February 24th or 25th.
Next I spent part of the morning working side-by-side with Nengah and his workers (mostly relatives of Nengah). I learned a lot watching them work. The tools, supplies, and materials are so different from what we use in the US. For example, the torch is driven by a baffle-style foot pump in order to obtain the proper oxygen mixture… the gauge is the human eye. The flux, a strange chunk of white substance that looked like rock salt, and solder (possibly just silver) are different as well. I don’t know how to explain it, as we could not figure out the communication in English. They take the extra left over metal, melt it down, pour it out onto a brick, and then roll it out in a rolling mill until it is a flat piece of metal again. Very time consuming process that requires a lot of muscle. I love all of the hand made tools of the trade, hammers with hand made wacky looking handles, well worn pieces of wood with various shapes and sizes on indentions, files with customized ends.
I was quietly watching a movie on my laptop in my room when I heard a tap, tap, tap and “sally” people in Indonesia have trouble saying shelly so they say “sally” and for some reason universally write Sally or Salley, even though I have sent them emails, given them business cards, etc with my name on it. In any case the person at the door had two new pendants for me from the new high-end worker. They are defiantly far superior in quality and workmanship. I have no access to the worker so when he modified my design to have pretty little petite loops in the back he made the pendants not fit on an Omega chain only a really thin chain. He also made another change assuming his idea would look better, and it might but it missed the point of what I wanted to try so we will see what the next sample looks like with my reinforced requests to follow the samples provided. Each time I work with a new worker I have to teach them my way of doing things… usually it is to say, no I wanted that asymmetrical or off center, or that I wanted the earrings to be different from side to side (not matching).
The designs show a lot of improvement from last year in looks, durability, as well as functionality. I already have so many changes and refinements for the designs for next year.
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