At the beginning of the studio Tess showed us some of the different jewelry that can be made by inner tubes. Some of the accessories she showed us definitely inspired a lot of our ideas. Together Mdackenzie and I knew we wanted to create a line of necklaces using bicycle inner tubes. We began the process by Googling different styles such as bib and Peter Pan necklaces. Then we used SketchUp to create the individual necklaces that were inspired by the ones that we had found on Google. When we started we did not have a definite number of necklaces that we wanted to create. As we played more and more with SketchUp we developed a better understanding of the program and of how we wanted our necklaces to look.

 

Once we had created a necklace on SketchUp it was time to get it to fit on an inner tube so that we could laser cut it. For the necklaces that were not created on SketchUp the ideas came from testing out different sizes and using different nuts and bolts and wires to attach them to each other (adhesives did not work.)  

 

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Above shows the process I went through to create some of our necklaces. You can see that my original ideas transformed as I moved deeper through the process.

 

Step 1: Creating the basic shape on SketchUp

Step 2: I used this technique to make sure everything was symmetrical

Step 3: More SketchUp

Step 4: What the first draft looked like!

Step 5: you can see that for some reason the second time it was printed it cut off the bottom, but we realized we liked this look better!

Step 6: we decided to cut off the bottom two triangles to make it fit better on the inner tube material, plus it is a bit more interesting looking.

Step 7: Finished necklace

 

Also above is the process of another necklace. As you can probably see, the inner tube outcome was not as great as the paper one. This is because the inner tube tends to curl naturally and so when placing it in the laser machine it is important that it is able to fit on a section that does NOT curl. However this necklace was so large that there was no way to get it to fit on just a flat section. Instead, we placed the template on top and made some slits (that would not affect the actual cutting out of the necklace)  and also used magnets to help it lay flat on the bed. However when it was cut, the pieces that were stretched out bounced back and it really affected how it was cut. Instead of just throwing it out though, we savaged the top part and made earings! We wanted to attempted this a second time and cut it in two separate parts and then attached it in the center. Also the two pieces we were going to use had different textures.

Whenever I was creating a necklace I usually started out with the shape. From there I would focus on one side. Once I finished that side and it looked how I wanted it to, I would cut it in half and mirror it so that the whole necklace was symmetrical.