Hanssen Studios Wearable Art
Hanssen Studios became a business when the company I was working for in 2008 went bankrupt and my wife Betty suggested we make a product together. She had been making lamp work glass beads for several years and she thought we could make hair sticks that combined her glass with my woodturning.
During our run, we sold more than two hundred hair sticks made from wood, glass, silver, and copper; every one unique. I used about 30 different kinds of wood and also made bracelets, shawl pins, silver and copper jewelry, and decorative items. We stopped actively selling when I found conventional employment again.
Shaping Metal Ferrules
The photos above show a few hair sticks with silver or copper ferrules. I made them by holding sterling silver or copper tubing between mandrels on the lathe and used a scraper burnishing tool with a special tool rest to push upwards and sideways against the tube as it spun to create tapers and decorative shapes.
I had to continually adjust the tailstock in or out while working because the tubes got longer when tapering and shorter when pushing metal into the middle to create beads or other shapes.
I decided to try scaling up what I learned by spinning tubes to see if I could make anything interesting by spinning metal disks. The section on Metal Spinning shows a few of the results