Hardwear

Sterling silver screws

When I was small my father built airplanes for Boeing and my mother made clothes for Penmans. They always brought home little scraps of things from their factories - metal bits, bits of lace - first by accident, and then on purpose after I begged them. Like most kids I liked trash better than toys; greasy nuts and bolts would often hang delicately around my neck secured by a length of underwear elastic, steel tubing with sequins glued on became rings. I kept all these tiny, useless things in an aluminum cash box. My current inability to turn away from junk drawers and cluttered storefronts - especially hardware and fabric stores - is obviously an extension of this childhood game of turning the crap I found in my parents' work aprons into jewellery that I so desperately wanted but was too young to have. Now that I actually know what I'm doing (for the most part, anyway), I thought I'd give it another shot. At Home Depot last summer I found some absurdly long screws that I thought would make cool rings. I bought two different kinds - a Robertson screw and some other dinky one - and cast them in silver. They weren't hard to turn into rings, just had to heat them up and then hammer them into shape. Cast that shit, light that shit, bang it!

In the photo above the rings are almost done, but they still looked too silvery. So, I oxidized them to make them look a bit more...industrial? And here are the Hardwear giftboxes I made using some crazy tape I found in Tokyo! The screw rings are the first in what I hope will be an entire Hardwear collection. You can see them this Saturday, December 3rd, at Handmade Holiday, and next weekend at City of Craft.