Hey everyone, it's me again with another piece of the jewelry I made in the last year. This one was the product of impulse. I was watching a video about the manhattan project and the Alamogordo tests and it showed a piece of the glass that was formed from the nuclear blast and mentioned that it had been a popular curiosity that was sold at tourist traps and swap meets for a while in the 60s and 70s. So I thought 'I want a piece of that!' and found out you can easily get it online for fairly cheap. I got it in the mail and it sat on a shelf for years, I forgot I even had it until I was cleaning out my bookshelves and stumbled on it again. I had already started playing around with making jewelry and Immediately wanted to make something using the Trinitite, which is the way cooler name that's used for Alamogordo glass. Did some research and the radiation emitted is negligible like the same level as a cellphone, unless you eat this thing it is harmless and I coated it with a layer of clearcoat to add an extra layer of protection just in case.
This one was a pretty simplistic process. I used some thin strips of copper I had to wrap the edges of the Trinitite and two small premade brass jewel settings, then wrapped some steel wire through the back and used silver jewelry sodder to permanently connect everything. I added a couple small blue Topaz I got in a random lot of faceted stones into the fittings. In the end I look at the finished product and think, 'I would do that differently if I did this again.' but that's kind of par for the course. I like it though, it really came out looking like some melted chunk of debris from a explosion to me.
I call the piece "The consequences of industrial society." Because I am an edgy nerd... No it's because I think it's fitting. It's the burnt wreckage of humanity's impulse towards destruction, wire and brass melted into a jewel crusted shard of cooled shrapnel. It's beautiful in it's coarse ugliness I think... The consequences of industrial society have been a mixed bag, at once beautiful and transcendental while simultaneously disgusting and dehumanizing. They may have been a disaster for humanity, but disasters are epoch changing and transformative and people recover from them. No matter how bad it is or how bad it gets, there is always hope because people can't help but move forward. Anyway I hung the pendant on a 20 inch sterling silver spiga patterned chain.
Thanks for checking out my weird projects, and if you like the piece it is currently on sale on my Mercari account: https://merc.li/Yv8uHFMJb all proceeds contribute to my future experiments in fabrication or Crypto.