There are people who make deep impression in our lives and those who pass by without a trace. Here is a story of making a little gift for dear friends I am lucky to have in my life even though I met them briefly.
Meeting Jonesy
I’ve met Jonesy when we were working on a ship few years back. We were coming from different generations and from the other sides of the world, in fact we didn’t have much in common at all. You ever have that weird feeling where you meet a person and feel like you were the best buddies since the beginning of time? It was exactly like that for me.
We talked a lot. During one of casual conversations Jonesy shared his dreams about having a piece of land, some livestock and a badass tractor he would drive around together with his wife. It was inspiring to see those sparkles in his eyes. And fortunately enough shortly after that this dream of his has started to materialise as a Dreamin Fahm. This is where I got enlightened with the idea of making a meaningful gift to celebrate the dream came true.
Sketching the logo
Jonesy and his lovely wife are crazy about goats, amongst other creatures of course. So it was kind of an instinct to take a goat silhouette as basis for the to-be-produced gift. I browsed a bit the Dreamin Fahm Facebook page to get a picture of goat to get started. Even better – I found a plywood goat so it was much easier for me to outline it.
Since the freehand sketching is not really my strongest skill (I’m an engineer after all) I decided to use some innovation this time. Luckily I’ve got at my possession one of those fancy iPads with even fancier iPencil to draw almost like on a paper. It was true fun for me to play around in the Sketchbook app and I highly encourage everyone to give it a try.
It took me few tries and couple of Google searches to handle the layers in the app, but as a result I’ve got a nice and neat outline of the Facebook plywood goat. However, it would probably not be too smart and too damaging to use an iPad as a template for wire bending. It would be handy to decide on the size of the pendant though.
So another quick web search and I managed to export the outline into a pdf in a few different sizes. Then I printed the document with different scaling and voila – I have a bunch of paper goat templates at my disposal.
Framing
Once the outline is done is was pretty straightforward to go about making a main goat frame. It does get a bit tricky to flatten the frame out, but it is a matter of a proper heat treatment of your silver wire and gentle hammering.
What I didn’t really anticipate was the stiffness of the frame. It was way too bendy. Surely the letters should be able to keep the structure firm. But I planned to use a smaller wire for the letters which probably won’t be making much difference.
I decided to add a crossing line between the words Dreamin and Fahm. This piece of 1mm wire would act as a stiffener to the structure, like the ones you can find on a steel ship bulkheads.
With the stiffener in place I started to solder the letters together. When the first word was done it appeared that I was wrong about the firmness. A lot of solder joints made the whole piece hard like a monolith. Well, maybe not that hard but in general I was happy with the result and I proceeded to solder down the Fahm.
Decorating
A frame with words in it was looking really nice, but was kinda empty. And since I still have some of the twisted filigree wire it was like the right way to fix the emptiness. I deliberately didn’t put any of the filigree filament inside the letters as it would blur away the contrast. Already now it wasn’t too easy to read what was written there. Hence I added filigree into every other available opening to bring the Dreamin Fahm into the focus.
At the end there was an element I almost forgot about – the goat’s udder. It was as simple as getting couple of scrapped piece of wire, bending them into a tight u-shapes and soldering them in place. After the rigorous grinding off the excessive solder bumps and sticking wire ends I put the the whole piece into the acid and polished it until it shined like diamond.
Now the completed Dreamin Fahm pendant is packed into a cute velvet box and then into another cardboard one to get it shipped. I sincerely hope that it will cause a big happy smile on my friends’ faces once UPS delivers the package to their doorstep. After all, happy smiles of your loved ones is the only thing that matters, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, this item is not available for purchase. If you dream about something similar, please check my Etsy store or contact me through the form or on Instagram and let’s see what I can do 🙂