Monday, February 11th, 11am-4:30pm
With the recent winter storms shutting down transportation across the country, blood donation centers have asked for help from the San Diego Blood Bank. If you are a donor or know of someone who can donate, please help us meet our goal of 30 donations on 2/11/19. This is a great opportunity to help people across the country in a non-financial way. Making an appointment in advance will help us plan for donuts. Make your appointment | Get directions.

Friday January 4th, 5-9pm
We're thrilled to announce that Anneville Jewelry Lab is now officially open! We've been working hard on San Diego's newest jewelry maker co-work space so come by and help us celebrate with music, nibbles & sips and a raffle with all sorts of cool prizes (including free passes!). We'll also be offering exclusive memberships and discounted packages so you can ring in the New Year by making your art a priority. At The Jewelry Lab you'll find a space dedicated to creative focus and stocked with the top notch equipment needed to hone your craft. But Anneville is more than tools, it's a friendly, growing metal arts community. So stop by to have a look and help us celebrate!

Last Friday, March 4, we celebrated the release of the Artist Odyssey's new film "Anne Wolf: The Ancient Art of Mokume Gane." We started off with mokume gane demonstrations in the courtyard right next to the film premiere. A pretty good crowd gathered to watch the hammering and torching of metal. I enjoyed answering audience questions that ranged from geeky mokume speak about layer stacks and solid-state vs. liquid state diffusion bonding, to where I buy my materials and what kinds of gold I used.
As dusk gathered, we all moved inside to watch the film premiere, a 12-minute documentary by The Artist Odyssey. This film is part of a larger project of artist documentaries; five are up on their website now, with many more on the way.
I think the folks at Artist Odyssey did a fabulous job of telling my story and bringing to light the fascinating technique of mokume gane. Great music and graphics too! I loved how they emphasized why I only use recycled metals, and also how meaningful it is for me as part of the LGBT community to be creating wedding bands for straight and gay couples alike.
If you missed the premiere, you can see it on their website here.
After the film, we all headed up to my studio. I wanted to show some fun new equipment I have that makes the bonding and forging of my mokume gane much easier - and plus I thought folks would enjoy watching glowing hot metal be squeezed flat in a 20-ton hydraulic press! We have some video of that coming soon - need to sit down with my tech guru (aka Ame) to get that edited and uploaded.
By the end of the evening I was pretty tired, but so grateful for the love and support of friends and family. Big thanks to my assistant Francesca for working a very long day and enlisting the help of her boyfriend Marc. Thanks also to Alan Ziter and everyone at NTC for their support. And of course thanks to my sweetheart Ame for taking such great pics and video of the event, even though she was still recovering from an impressive bout of bronchitis!

I’m very excited to introduce my first intern, Francesca Urciuoli. Francesca is a talented jewelry artist from Perugia, Italy who will be assisting me and advancing her jewelry/metals studies here at Anneville for the next few months. Francesca will be helping out with my classes at Anneville Studio and volunteering at WCCPL, sharing with us her unique skills and outlook.
Francesca is fresh from finishing her MFA at the top-ranked metals program at SUNY New Paltz in New York. Before that, she received her BFA in metals from Alchimia in Florence, Italy. Francesca's approach to jewelry focuses on exploring the properties of unconventional jewelry materials such as metals, silicon and fabric.
We invite you to a special Friday Night Liberty to help welcome Francesca. Friday, February 5th, 5-9pm. She will be showing her work, and would love to answer your questions about her schools, her work, the difference between American and European jewelry, what it was like to drive across the U.S. from New York to San Diego, and anything else you might have always wanted to ask an Italian jeweler. Word has it she cooks, too! And that she's bringing homemade Italian goodies for us to share. Wow!
See some of Francesca's work below, and more on her website.

We had a great turn-out for this year's holiday open studio. Folks of all ages enjoyed the fun of making their own copper pendant with pre-cut discs or rectangles. With all the prep work done, folks were free to focus on their designs. And the low cost of $5 made it an easy decision for some holiday creativity. The event worked out so well I did again the next weekend for the Holiday Walkabout. I was so busy handing out pendant blanks that night I didn't even get to take photos!