If the riveting gods smile on me tomorrow, these components will become a brooch.
The enamelled bicycle dates all the way back to 2011, when I first did an Experimental Enamelling Summer School course with Jessica Turrell at Morley College. For some reason Barbara Christie, former head of the Jewellery Department at Morley, was also doing the course, and made a comment about drilling holes in the copper blanks so the samples could be riveted on to a piece later (she did not approve of ‘chemical bonding’). As a newbie jeweller, I’d made one (failed) attempt to join two pieces of silver with a rivet, but I drilled some holes anyway.
It was the only time I met Barbara, who passed away a couple of years later, but many of her students are still doing classes at Morley and passing on her tips and techniques.
Most of the other elements were made in February 2020, when Judy McCaig came to Morley to teach a week-long riveting masterclass. It was almost the last thing I did before Covid closed everything down, and I never managed to get this brooch finished. Since I started at Studio 9d I’ve done all the drilling and made most of the rivets, and yesterday I polished the perspex and brass components at Morley.
If I can get it put together before June, it’ll have been less than 10 years in the making…