Adventures in Electroforming: The Journey Begins

The carpal tunnel surgery was a success!  I have been back at work for a couple weeks now and have started arting in my spare time again.  There is still a little bit of flexibility issues in my palm and a tiny bit of pain here and there but both are getting better every day.  Being out of pain is amazing.  It is hard to describe what it is like to be in constant pain and then suddenly not.  I feel an intangible mental lightness.

The procedure and the recovery were a LOT more than I bargained for.  I thought I would be able to be on the computer gaming or doing art a couple days after the surgery with a little boo-boo.  Let's just say I am dumb as rocks and realized after the fact that I had talked myself out of pre-procedure anxiety by convincing myself this was no biggie.  Because I was stuck watching Netflix and YouTube for 3 weeks straight, I stumbled onto something new to take up my time, creative energy, and money.  Hint: read the title of this post.

For the next little while, I am going to be using this blog to write about and chart my growth in learning how to electroform and make metal jewelry.  I hope doing so will help other noobs to this artform out there find their footing.  YouTube is entirely teaching me how to do this.  The results are just starting to look positive - I am wearing my first pendant right now (and I'll post the first couple of weeks worth of atrocities in the next post or two)!  I am also having to learn how to do very minor metalsmithing so that content will also likely find itself here.

Before I write my first post with some actual meat in it, I want to shout out Ralph McCasky of Nightside Studios whose work was my first real introduction to electroforming when I saw it in person at a bead show many years ago, and to the four YouTubers that finally influenced my decision to go ahead down this path.

The CrafsMan SteadyCraftin: Just go subscribe to him right now.  He is amazing and every time he uploads, my husband and I get really excited to watch his show.  He makes all sorts of things, has a great personality, and is just the most wholesome thing on the internet.  He does not do electroforming, but his video on copper patinas that he made back in Jan 2019 made me fall in love with the idea of doing stuff in copper.

Yvonne Williams : I have been subbed to her for quite some time.  She is the most calming crafter and does a lot of cosplay related crafts.  While I was laid up, she did an electroforming in copper video and I became immediately obsessed!

Nick Martinelli : His was the first video that came up when I searched for electroforming.  This was the best intro video I could have hoped for because it has everything I needed to know on a basic level to help me decide if I was going to push forward or not.  I wish he had made more videos!

Jason Welsh : Put a big bold asterisk and 73 exclamation points next to this one.  Jason is amazeballs.  He has shared so many of his techniques, processes, hints, and tips and almost all of it is freely available on YouTube.  If you have even the slightest inclination to get into this, go visit his site.