Conceptual Framework

In this post I depart from Making things in the physical world (mostly) and throw my hat into the fray of competing ideologies. (That's a dirty lie, I'm sort of an academic and live much of my life in the fray of competing ideologies.) I'm also proposing that Making doesn't have to be brand new fabrication. Working with and altering existing physical things, or ideas, is entirely valid.

For a long time, I have been searching for a conceptual framework which can support, characterize and show the interconnectedness of the great variety of activist work which I support. As a committed anti-fundamentalist I support a lot of activism I don't necessarily fully agree with. Activists who are interested in the same goals fight a lot about which particular goal is the most important and which tactics are the best to use toward that particular end. While that's a good and valid conversation, it often gets far too bitter for the severity of the disagreements. If we can't celebrate diversity of opinion and belief in our activism, how will we celebrate diversity of opinion and belief in the world we seek to create?

Hmmmm. I got a little sidetracked. Hope that's not too onerous.

My point is that I want a framework for what I have seen described simply as "the movement" since we can't seem to agree what movement it is, but we all generally agree with each other. (Unfortunately this is one of those you-either-get-it-or-you-don't things. It should be clear by the end of the post. If you still don't get it I'll try to explain, but you have to tell me you don't get it first.)

Thankfully my friend Michael Tank presented, at the last California Student Sustainability Coalition Conference, an idea that E3, a student group at UCLA which Tank helped found, is based on. (Image left.) This is an elegant framework which I highly admire. It's phrased to have a nice ring to it when you read it out loud. It presents two of the main directions in activism as complimentary, with a single point of immediate contact and direct linkages in other work. It presents a wide variety of activist work as interconnected and complimentary and can allow activists to see each other as engaged in different fronts of a common cause rather than as competing. That's really important so I'm going to say it twice.

This conceptual framework has the potential to help activists working on separate things to see each other as engaged in different fronts of a common cause rather than as comp

eting for support and attention.

As amazing as this framework is, I see real problems with some of it's specifics. Particularly "Economy" as a goal. While some of us in the movement know what we mean by "Economy" we're not using the actual meaning of that word. Almost universally, we mean something very different than what the word 'economy' has been historically used to describe.

The term emerged in the Late 15th Century which corresponds to a significant period of enclosure of the English countryside which, in turn, was the primary accumulation which initiated capitalism in England. From there it spread throughout Europe. The term economy was coined in order to describe the management systems developed around facilitating this primary accumulation and constructing the scarcity necessary to develop a working class. In its most basic form "economy" refers to choice under scarcity.

Ok. Lemme unpack that a little bit. "Primary Accumulation" is the transfer of thing of value which are not privately owned, but rather held as common property, into private ownership. This is the creating of the capital necessary for capitalism to function. The scarcity we all take for granted, that allows the engine of the modern economy to function by requiring that we participate, was initially constructed by depriving the peasant and land tenant classes of their rights to use the land and make a livelihood from it, thereby transforming those who were agriculturalists into a working class. That artificial scarcity is maintained today in things like food and resource distribution inequalities and inconsistencies. What's key here, is that that very scarcity is constructed by a system which only operates when things are scarce. It is entirely possible to have a system in which scarcity is not a primary factor. (I'm drawing much of this from a lecture by a people's historian named Iain Boal. He does not maintain a web presence, but this is an interview he gave that touches on many of these same points.)

What is crucial here for the conceptual framework above is that in makes a system which requires false scarcity a goal. The "Economy" is, in its truest sense, a linchpin of the project of Modernity and conglomerated capitalistic society which those of us in the movement are fighting against. I will go so far as to say that as long as the economy remains, as long as a system of choice under scarcity is how goods and services are transfered, we cannot win.

Therefore, "Economy" cannot be a goal of this movement. But, for those of us who mean by "economy" something different than what economy actually is, what word can we use? What is that goal, and how can it best be described? I suggest "Ample." Ample does not have the advantage of being both a noun and an adjective, but I would much rather live an ample life than an economical life. I would much rather live in an ample world than an economical world. And, "Ample" expresses a clear goal which I think we can agree upon. We want to end the constructed scarcity and provide ample lives for everyone. Not opulent, not frugal, ample.

Also, and this is a much more, to my mind, minor quip, "Regeneration" is not quite right. The word means to recreate what was once there. I think has come too perilously close to romanticizing the past and perhaps slipped a little. I am not aware of any time in the past when people have lead generally equitable, ample and ecological lives. (I am, for the moment, dismissing some primitivist philosophies as excessive romanticization based on in

sufficient information.) Instead of "Regeneration" I am in favor of "Reformation." I recognize that the term reform is thrown around in government and industry too much, but I refuse to let them take words away from my vocabulary! Reformation means, among other things, "a radical change for the better" (SOED6). That is, I believe, what we want. Reasonably few of us want to burn down all of society and try again from a romanticized hunter-gatherer past. We want to root out the evils we see as evils and promote the good we see as good. We don't want to cut something off and regenerate it, we want to take what we have and reform it, radically change it for the better.

And so, I humbly present my change of two words to the model above. I changed the form of the Equity and Ecology to Equitable and Ecological so that all three Reformation words could share the same ring to the word, as they did before. I particularly like this model, and I believe that my tweaks add to it.

Though, my tweaks are not perfect. As my friend Tank mentioned when I first proposed Ample as an alternative to Economy, it looses the E3 meme value that way. To Tank, as a community organizer and designer of memes which will hopefully take hold of the imaginations of large numbers of people, this is a serious loss. To me, saying what I mean more clearly is far worth while, but I certainly see Tank as having a valid point.

In either case, what this framework does is organize disparate arms of the movement into something resembling agreement and mutual interest.

This project is substantially different than the Making I've posted about here before. This is a Making of the mind and of ideas, which is wildly different but no less (nor, I hasten to add, more) valuable than the Making of the hands and of possessions.

Trying to Express Making

I went to the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco last Sunday. It was a fascinating event. The throngs of consumers, of which I was a part, examining and buying from the booths of ostentatiously handmade, but often simply seller designed, wares was eye opening. First off, there was nothing 'renegade' about this event. (Renegade meaning a person who abandons their religion or principles.) There was an overwhelming abundance of cute ideas repeated ad nauseam until I thought I would have to set fire to the next flirty pop-culture reference t-shirt I saw. There were also a number of genuine artisans there who were selling great works. If I was really together I would publish some highlights. If folks actually care enough about my opinion to ask, I just might. It was a pretty mixed bag, but I was astounded by the amount of traction that some of these salespeople got for nothing more than cute designs. (Yes, a t-shirt you can write on with chalk is pretty cool, but how far do you expect to go on a one trick pony? - And, more to the point, how far will the public follow a one trick pony before they realize they've seen that one before!?) One more reason why I don't hold out much faith in humanity.

The Renegade Craft Fair, and indeed the entire Crafter/Maker/DIY community (I recognize I'm making a horrible overgeneralization. Deal with it.) challenges my ideas of what I'm doing here, particularly my very conscious decision not to try to integrate into one of the many DIY/Maker/Crafter communities out there. I see many examples of what I might consider Making, but not labeled as such by the creators. (Well, naturally, this is language basically nobody else uses.) Yet Making is more than at tool for separating the cute but stupid gimmicks from the work which is truly beautiful and useful.

The copout here is to call Making a "Design and Production Philosophy." This would be easy, and I could delineate many ways in which Making can be differentiated from other forms of creating. I don't need the exercise in ego gratification and I don't need to justify myself to whoever reads this blog. It might even be true to consider Making a kind of philosophy, but it allows, or even encourages, the positioning of Making in the familiar, and overused, realm of intellectuality (different from 'intellectualism' which is not only overused but becoming perverse). As a trained academic, having an intellectually defensible position is important to me. However, the intellect is not the only important tool in the pursuit of knowledge and truth. (Never mind hundreds of years of Western philosophy.)

When I am Making, the decisions and calculations that happen are not intellectual, indeed are hardly conscious. I work to tease out those decisions and the process of making them when I write here, yet the act of Making has almost nothing to do with conscious, intellect based thoughts. Though, in all fairness to my mind, once I decide what to do there is sometimes a fair amount of thought put into how to do it. This isn't the intellect deciding how to build a chair as much as it is the intellect evaluating which glues will hold the wood best after the proverbial gut has decided the design of the cain. Nevertheless, as my sainted grandfather told me, and my father has reminded me time and time again, people can rationalize anything. That is how this writing is made, as much as anything else, it is a process of rationalizing what were almost entirely irrational (here meaning without reasoning) decisions. Yet that need not imply nonsensical. Simply because my intellect was not crucial to my decision making does not mean that it was a poor decision (again, disregard popular Western epistemological beliefs).

The point here is two fold. First, Making, unlike much other work (at least, in my experience), is informed by, not lead by the mind. Second, and less obvious, is that any philosophy of Making will happen in exactly the same way that Making happens. It will emerge as if (or, for the mystic in me, literally) by divine intervention, may require some translation into what can be done, expressed and shared, but will emerge when ready. The language available to talk about our non-intellect based knowledge is impoverished. I am not sure that I do my thesis justice here.

Nevertheless, that struggle is very much of the purpose of this blog. To explore these ideas and present these thoughts as part of the process of Making an expressible understanding of Making.

Camera, frustration & Chili

In a classic example of why being good with my hands serves me well I was gifted a camera yesterday.  The camera in question had fallen out of a second story window.  When it was retrieved, the lens wouldn't retract.  The camera was declared busted, but I still wanted to examine it.  Upon handling it I realized that the telescoping lens was out of square with the camera body.  On impulse, I pushed on it to see if it would go back to the right place.  It did.  The camera now fixed, I returned it to the owner, Austin.  It came up in conversation (I asked about the price of the camera) that  I needed a camera and, since this one had been a gift and he had a better one at home, Austin gave me the camera he had been going to throw away.  Huzzah!!  To celebrate here are pictures of the Turquoise Pendant from earlier and a new Mother of Pearl Pendant that I Made the other day with 26 gauge wire that I think is steel.  

Moo cards are not exactly my friend.  It appears that they inflate by 5% and crop the edges of the images which are designed to be the perfect size.  I speculate that this has to do with the printing and cutting process not being exact, but I sure would have appreciated some warning.  After some experimentation I found an image size that, after being inflated and cropped, was what I wanted.  I quickly (read: sloppily) made sure that my designs had borders so the process could be inexact and not give me cards with big white stripes and then made my final order.  The first one I had to get customer service to cancel after they were slow acknowledging that their system won't just print the cards how I wanted (long, frustrating e-mail conversation).  I'll update on the accuracy of their printing and my work around when the cards arrive.

I'm Making Chili today.  Food, and cooking, is one of the few truly universal human activities and experiences.  The ability to consistently Make good food is unquestionably a worthwhile goal to pursue.  Hopefully I'm on my way there!  I'm using a recipe that my Dad gave me off the top of his head one day.  It's a pretty basic recipe, well, compared to some I've seen, and has a good bit of meat in it (extra tonight because I was sold .15 lbs more meat than I asked for).  I like the simple aspect of it.  The recipe is just red beans, meat, garlic, onion and tomatoes with seasoning of Tabasco Sauce, Worcestershire Sauce (mine is, entertainingly, vegan), chili powder, cumin and two bay leaves.  Well, and water (the only part of this dish not environmentally appropriate since it comes from the Hetch Hetchy Dam).  All of my ingredients here are organic and I got the tomatoes last Sunday at the Farmer's Market.  The recipe actually calls for some tomato paste to (I think) thicken it up, but I opted to just add extra tomatoes (I bought more than I needed) and boil it down.  The meat is ground Bison.  

The guy at the deli counter when I went and bought my ground meat today didn't know it by that name though.  I had to ask for 'Buffalo.'  I prefer to say Bison, because a buffalo is a different animal.  I also strongly prefer Bison to Beef  for a variety of reasons.  Bison are native to North America, a threatened species, better for the land they graze on, impossible to pen into feed lots, and won't freeze to death as cows periodically do.

I didn't know this morning that I was going to make Chili.  I hadn't soaked beans, so I had to quick soak them (simmer briefly and let stand for about an hour) and I had to go out and get the ground Bison.  I came home and started the Chili.  Boiled the beans in water with a little Tabasco and Worcestershire.  I chopped and sautéed the garlic and onions and put them aside so I could cook the bison in the same skillet.  Sometimes I'll toss the meat in with the onions, but I was worried it would overflow my skillet.  2.15 lbs is a lot of meat!  I might make it with less than the recipe calls for next time.  When the meat was cooked, with some chili and cumin in it, everything went into the pot with the beans.  Except the tomatoes, which I quartered (they're small tomatoes) before I put them in the pot.  Boiled it for a while and then went at the tomato quarters with the back of a wooden spoon.  After crushing the tomatoes it got a good bit soupier, which I liked because it let me turn up the heat some to cook everything together more.  (I don't know if a higher temperature actually helps the flavors meld, but I feel better.)  After a while I turned down the heat, unfortunately I wasn't watching it enough and it got a little sticky on the bottom.  The chili thickened up pretty quick and I took it off the heat.  This batch ended up being pretty spicy, which is exciting!  Image of Chili!!

For those of you who care – I am responding to comments and trying to entice you into conversation.  I understand if you want to elude me.

Moo Card Designs

Let it first be said that I don't like how Blogger handles images.  The batch upload limit is too small (5), the formatting options once in my post are pathetic and the window for composing in is too small.  Why don't they make the composition window as large as my browser window? or at least more than 1/4 the size!  (Huh, more jargon I don't have.  Highlights how rarely I ever talk about this kind of thing.  I don't know professionals who have the time for dabblers or dabblers who dabble in as many things as I do.)

These are designs for Mini Moo Cards which are basically half size business cards with designs of your choosing printed on them.  They're cute, quirky and I have a coupon.  However, they're also not terribly environmentally friendly.  They have to be shipped from London, are made on a typical paper (read bleached and non-recycled) and have a plastic laminate on both faces.  These things give me pause.  

Nonetheless, I proceed.  They come in packs of 100 cards and my occasional preference for symmetry impels me, in this case, to create a batch of images which will evenly divide 100.  The cards are 28x70mm, which is the template size for my designs.  I can't find their printing resolution on the website, but I decided not to be worried about that.  

My primary design concerns are to use my own images, to create cards that will be both attractive and engaging and to indicate that these cards are my own design.  The first two I addressed as I do all my Making: by feel.  The last I equivocated over for some time.  Ultimately, I decided to include a 5mm Creative Commons license image in each design.  This is not because I am concerned that anyone will scan my images and use them for anything.  That would be so much work (to get a decent scan of a picture that small) that I just might think it was worth letting them.  I'm also not a purist enough to think that these images just 'should' have ownership tags. (I know, wrong field, but the same idea.)  Rather, by indicating that the image is controlled I obliquely raise the question of who controls it.  The obvious conclusion is that I do, since it is my card and there is no reference to another person on the card.  I'm comfortable accepting that not everyone will put all that together.  I really don't want to toot my own horn in any more grandiose fashion.  

Most of the images are simple crop jobs.  There are two that required some work in Photoshop, and I've included the original images.  I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, good at Photoshop, but I make up for it by being persistent and taking my time.  Descriptions are bellow images.

This is a very simple crop of a macro shot of some delicate flowers.  It was taken on a hike in Sequoia National Park.  (No link because they're not an internet entity.)

These flowers were shot on that same hike.  I included more of the background in this one because I particularly like the delicate pinks among the more basic colors.  (More jargon trouble.)

This is also from Sequoia.  On a different visit, I think, though the vegetation indicates it was also spring at the time.  I have always loved the way the morning sun streames down through the trees.

This was taken in Italy, a few hours drive outside of Rome.  We (the tour I was on) had driven out to a beautiful inlaid wood workshop, probably in Sorrento and quite possibly Melany Inlaid Wood Work (that's the best I can do with the tags on the music box I bought).  In a ravine barely a block from the shop there was this grown over building and some decaying grounds.  We could see it very well from the sidewalk on a bridge.  That's where I took this photo, and several others.  Incidentally, I once Stumbled across a picture of this very same structure.  It made me smile.

This is Pompei.  The image is. I believe, a little cliche among people who pay attention to Pompei, but I still like it.  Especially with the clouds on the volcano.  Also, I felt I needed some architecture to round out the series.  Not that anyone will look at all 20 once they're printed.  Pompei and Sorrento were the same trip.

This is a non tourist section of Bangkok.  I had gotten myself lost and hired a Tuk-tuk (Wikipedia) to get me back to my hotel as I didn't want to be wandering the streets after dark.  The Tuk-tuk had stopped at a traffic light and I managed to snatch the shot.  I know you're not suppose to photograph the sun without a special lens, but I really don't care and it was a dying camera.  I really enjoy the interplay of modernity and tradition in the composition.  Also, here I placed the Creative Commons license at the lower left instead of right, which I have done with the others.  I made that choice because the lower right of this image is too crucial to the composition to allow the license image there.

I spent a year between high school and college traveling the country WWOOFing with a book provided by WWOOF-USA.  (I prefer for the acronym to mean Willing Workers On Organic Farms.)  The dog is named Hazel and she was one of a small pack kept by the owners of a farm in Oklahoma.  She was ridiculously cute when awake too.

Like I said, not great Photoshop skills.  I can't even get the color on the bird to liven up without making the background horribly artificial looking.  (I'm not even trying for jargon here.)  While the muted approach does work with the austerity of the bird, I spent a couple hours trying.  The image was taken at Hilton Head Island, SC on a family vacation (if my memory serves).  I first tried just isolating the ... I think falcon, maybe hawk, but the image was too empty.  Adding the palm fixed it and removing the telephone lines was at least possible.

This is a personally poignant picture, but I also really love the yellow carnation floating in the birdbath while you can see the tree and sky overhead.  I took several pictures of this at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church which is in Knocksville.  For my one reader, if you happen not to know, this is the same UU (Wikipedia) church that was shot up last year (NYT).  My visit was long before that, about five years ago.

I saw this beauty in, I think, the garden of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, GA.  That flower sure looks like a rose to me, but the foliage seems to be off.  If you, my sole reader, happen to be able to help with identification of the butterfly or the plant I would be quite grateful.

This luna moth is perched on one of the beams supporting the roof over the front porch on my folk's house in Boone, NC.  My mom noticed the moth and called the rest of the family.  It was daylight, and odd to see a moth out at that time.  Maybe it was spending the day there trying to be camouflaged.  In any case, it remained still while I took quite a few images of it.  This was challenging Photoshop work.  I had to complete the end of the wing not in the photo and extend the plane of the beam it's on a considerable distance.  Even the background proved challenging once I realized that a single color green fill stole the realism from the image.  I didn't do a perfect job, but I did alright, and at the size these will be printed at I don't think anyone, besides maybe a professional in the field, will be looking closely enough to notice.  The moth is too lovely to not have included.

I noticed this praying mantis while building cutbacks in a hill on my folk's property so we could more easily walk down it.  Thankfully, it stayed still while I went and got my camera.  The image has been rotated to fit well on the template, but the odd angle of the grass highlights the insect.

This statue is my mother's Guan Yin (Wikipedia).  I believe the glass butterfly is hers too.  They're resting on the top of a chest? cabinet? of Chinese drawers.  (I think I'm using that term properly – as a name for a particular style.  It's from China and incorporates stylistic elements including iron fittings at the corners and a locking door in front of several small drawers.  Like everything else, please feel free to correct me.)  Again, I chose to place the license image at the left even though it draws out the piece of another glass butterfly that I couldn't crop out.  The bottom right is just too important to be compromised.

Edit: Thanks to Jana (my Mom!) - The piece of furniture is a Tansu Chest from Japan.  It was made of kiri wood with spaces in the planks of the drawers to facilitate air flow - to store textiles, which is exactly what it is currently doing.

This is the view off the back porch of my folk's house.  I spent many years seeing sunsets like this all summer every night.  Well, not quite this nice, that's why I took the picture.

This is a self portrait I did in high school.  Nobody told me that portraits are supposed to look like people until I tried to pass the exam to get into Kindergarden, and by that time I had already made up my mind that portraits are supposed to represent people.  That doesn't necessarily mean 'look like.'

 
A close up of the self portrait.  I'm cropping a tiny sliver of a much larger image, which is why the focus is screwy.  I don't think folks will really notice, but if it's more glaring than I thought, I need to know.

Another close up featuring the same crystal.  It may be a little egotistical, but I'm quite proud of this work of art.  I poured an enormous amount of my time, energy, mementos and person into it.  I tend to describe this type of Making as "mixed media sculpture involving inlaying wire, stone and other natural objects into pieces of wood."  I guess it's a decent explanation, but it never feels like it does justice to the piece as a whole.  Then again, pictures don't really either.  I felt that it was important to present images of something I made with my hands.  This is one of few things that I've worked on and actually photographed.

This is a tunnel with a creek running through it on the campus of Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.  The lens flair is entirely natural, I didn't touch this up at all.  I like the 'light at the end of the tunnel' feel to it.

This is a fountain on the ASU campus.  I caught it, the wind, and the sun making beautiful rainbow babies one day.

This is the worst and possibly most interesting picture here.  I saw the dead and decayed bird in one of the planter areas at my high school freshman year.  That this bird had died, fallen on the mulch and then decayed right at the front of the school without anyone doing anything was a poignant metaphor of the school for me at the time.  Unfortunately, I mangled the image trying to get the skeleton to stick out and don't have the original photograph.  If you look closely there are some weird brown streaks in the lower left region.  I have no idea.  Happily, the bleached look gives it some character and it not only passes as artistic, but, I think, still has something to tell us.

The overarching theme of this blog is Making.  These designs are unquestionably Making, although I didn't describe them in that language.  Developing what language I'm going to be using is a large part of the work of blogging here.  Somewhere up there I used "go by feel" to describe the process of deciding in Making.  That was a good description.

I continue to need help with jargon.  That will probably be an ongoing theme.  Also, I'm interested in conversations and thoughts I wouldn't have on my own more than anything else.  I'm going to be introducing myself with these images.  Is that a good idea?  What works well, so I know to repeat it?  What doesn't work, so I can reevaluate? 

Edit:  Upon further review it has come to my attention that Moo also prints in the States.  So shipping is slightly less bad.  Slightly.

A Beginning

I'll start by admitting that this (writing to the theoretical anonymous masses) is awkward for me.  My original idea was to use consistent blogging to manufacture the illusion of social pressure to have things to blog about.  In this case specifically what I have always called 'Making' (more on what that is later).  I've been putting it off because I don't own a functional digital camera; much of my Making involves manipulating the physical world and trying to describe it without images is frustrating, as my probably 2 readers are about to notice.  However, I'm about to frustrate all two of you because a woman whom I am coming to admire named Sarah Dopp truly believes in the importance and validity of having an internet presence.  While her arguments are not entirely convincing the strength of her conviction and my respect for her have conspired to be motivating.  Bah.

I'll try to explain Making some other day.  Making an explication of Making is a big project.

I Made a new pendant for my collection today.  Nothing terribly fancy but I solved a major problem in design in a way I'm quite pleased with.  I've had this bead for some time now.  It's a robin's egg blue cracked turquoise stone about the size of the end of my thumb and very vaguely heart shaped with the hold drilled from the inside of the dimple to the point-ish area.  It's a beautiful piece of turquoise.  

Out of respect for the beauty and tradition of presenting turquoise and sliver together I decided that I wanted to place a sliver strand along both flat-ish sides of the stone.  Well, I haven't got any appropriately gauged silver wire, but I do have some tarnish resistant silver looking wire, probably a nickel alloy, that would work.  My silver wire is 24 gauge and I haven't got much of it.  I was worried that it would get drowned against the turquoise.  The 20 gauge silver looking wire was right, especially because I have plenty, but more than one strand would be a too dominant visual.  

The challenge was to get a single strand of wire up both sides of the bead and terminate in an appropriate loop at the top.  I immediately recognized that threading the hole in the bead in a traditional manner would be a bad idea as I would then have to hide one end of the wire at the bottom of the bead and construct a loop at the top with a single strand.  Instead I cut a maybe five inch strand of wire and began experimenting.  

The first problem was to fasten the wire in such a way that I would place the strands where I wanted them.  I was attracted to the idea of incorporating the hole drilled in the stone into my design.  Intuitively, I bent both ends of the wire about 1/4 inch up from the end at 90 degree angles.  The angled portions I inserted into the bottom, dimpled, side of the stone.  Thankfully both strands fit.  I then had a loop that passed from the bottom hole around the top of the stone and back into that same hole.  

I opted to twist the wire together from the top of the stone toward the top of my loop to tighten the loop.  As I was twisting it I decided to try to form my (oh dear god jargon fail) I decided to try to form the loop where the (epic jargon fail) where the necklace itself would pass through and the finished pendant hang from out of the wire I was now twisting together.  Unfortunately, the two strands twisted together proved disproportionately challenging to manage and mangled the single strands along the side of the turquoise as I tried to wrangle the twisted strand into place.  Three failed attempts ensued.

At this point I had started using tools, specifically the round handle of a metal dentist's scraping tool, to assist in properly twisting the wire together (10 to one odds says I've now lost both my readers to "¡¡WTF!!") especially at the tricky finish at the end made trickier because it's a closed loop.  I had realized that I had to do something new.  Somehow I alight upon the idea of using the left over looped tail of the larger initial loop as the interface loop for the pendant and necklace.  This would require a smaller initial piece of wire which I eyeballed and went to town on.

Astoundingly, this worked on the first try.  Or, at least, it was the right length on the first try.  Unfortunately, the handle of the dentist's tool is too fat (approximate 3/8 inch diameter) to make an attractive interface loop.  My fingers don't have the precision necessary a that scale for that task and I needed a new tool.  In the single-mindedness that always accompanies Making I grabbed a finished wood file with a metal shaft.  The file itself is rarely useful (acquired before I understood wood working at all), but I keep the set just in case.  In this case the approximate 1/8 inch diameter shaft was perfect and with only three and a half full twists my pendant was complete.  

Leaving me with the simple problem of how to get the beautiful pendant, and specifically the interface loop, off of the shaft of the tool I'd used.  The file portion was too large and I didn't want to cut away the rubber grip.  Thankfully I was able to, after some very ... determined persuasion coax the grip off and slide my pendant unharmed to freedom.  The grip even went back on!

I'm pleased as punch with the pendant which is simple and beautiful with the small coil that holds the wire tight centered on the top of the hold drilled in the turquoise stone.  If I had a camera I'd share with both of you. 

¡¡¡Oh dear Gods above I need jargon help with jewelry!!!

Edit: Thanks to Elethia – what I called the "interface loop" should actually be called a "bail."  Good to know!