Kalaya Steede

How do you all approach commissions? I utterly love them.  It is a chance to work close with the client and design something pretty bad ass ! Remember my list from last week? Step... 1.  This is going to be AWESOME The design... Nothing fancy here.  The difficult part was figuring out the font. Do you all realize how many fonts there are? I think I need a degree in graphic design and an MBA!  We need to know how to do so many things! OH I digress...I used PnP paper. First try was a bust only because I forgot to clean my metal! Oh Kalaya!!! On the second try not all of the letters transferred.  I just filled them in with my trusty oil based sharpie there. Etched for 45 minutes using electrolysis with sodium chloride and cleaning every 15 minutes. I got a pretty good etch.  I etched off close to half the thickness of the metal. I am hypothesizing that the uneven etch across the sheet is due to my tubing in th...

Bonjour!  Lately I have been thinking about making a belt buckle for myself.   I do not know why.  It is not like I wear my shirts tucked in or anything!  But it would be nice to have a REALLY cool buckle! So when I saw this fantastic piece by artist Jesse Bert I just HAD to share!   Photo by Jesse Bert   Come on...take a close look!  Check out those pointy ends.  Have you ever seen anything like it?  I mean the boots that is.  I hear it is the trend in northern Mexico and started in Dallas of all places!  The boots are known as botas vaqueras  exóticas .  Apparently these are worn at night clubs and anywhere one wants to make a statement. Oops...I digress...anyway the botas vaqueras exóticas was the inspiration behind the piece shown above.  Also included was this iron grate, as Jesse describes "...wonderful iron grate I found on the ground in a village of the mountains of Oaxaca.  I crea...