Out of the kiln, into the pickle pot

I've now enameled just about everything in sight. I even enameled a piece made from sterling silver wire, which meant going through the rigmarole of bringing the fine silver to the surface by heating, quenching, pickling, repeat 6 more times. Not a problem - just did it in between switching various things in and out of the kiln. You could practically hear the swish as I moved from the soldering station to the kiln. Heat, quench, dump in pickle, swish, open kiln and remove red hot items, put in waiting items, close kiln, swish, heat, quench, dump in pickle, swish....get the picture? (Yes, we see...) Can you tell how much I love being able to say that I have a soldering station and kiln? Yes, they're both temporarily set up in my kitchen and I have to break them down after each use, but working with hot metal is a complete thrill.

All but one of the adinkra pieces I made are now covered in enamel. The green circles in the upper left is the one made of sterling silver. The only one that isn't covered with enamel is now hanging in front of an enamel copper oval. I like the idea of an enamel piece showing through the silver wire, but I'm not sure if this is the right piece. (I worry that it makes the adinkra look a little like a cockroach.) There's a second shot that shows the copper pendant better. It was made using a very cool enameling pen that writes with what looks like black paint. For this pendant I doodled on the bare copper, then covered the whole thing with flux, which is basically transparent uncolored enamel. It keeps the copper from getting covered with firescale and turning dark brown, so you get the nice rosy glow of heated copper. The other neat thing is that the powdered enamel doesn't seem to like the black pen enamel, so you get this interesting resist effect which I think you can see if you click on the second picture. I think this technique would look great with transparent colored enamel too, but sadly my starter kit of enamels from Rio Grande didn't come with any. It also didn't come with any yellow and there are TWO different shades of brown. Who wants brown enamel? (By the way, to see stuff on the Rio Grande website you have to be a member and log in. If you make and sell jewelry it's easy to become a member - call them, give them a website or real world location where your jewelry is sold, and you're in. For those of you who don't sell jewelry or don't want to become members, sorry. I'll try to keep the Rio Grande links to a minimum.)

Soldering is proceeding apace and yesterday I made two pieces that are definitely acceptable. I've even made them into necklaces. Not sure I'm going to sell them yet, but they're not bad. This one is a piece I made intending to replace the tendril components I ordered from somewhere -- I can't recall and can't find the components at any of my usual on-line jewelry supply haunts. You can see those components in a necklace here. Granted, my swirly thing isn't as delicate as the store-bought components and my soldering is a little visible while the store-bought soldering is invisible - but I'm quite happy with the swirly thing.

The other piece is based on a sketch of a spider web I saw a couple of months ago. It wasn't anything like your usual spider web, as you can see - of course, the real thing was much more detailed, but this is what looked best once I started piecing it together. I oxidized it and went for a Lair of the Black Widow look. I'm much less happy with the soldering in this one and the wire bending is awkward, but I think it captures the odd swoopy shape of the original pretty well. This one I'm not going to sell - I have a friend whose birthday is coming up who could, as they say, rock this necklace. Wonder who it could be?

Childhood dream, take 3

Fairly soon after I started working with PMC, I bought a Paragon Quick Fire kiln. There was a less expensive option, but when I read that the Quick Fire can also be used to enamel metal and fuse glass, I was sold. Ever since I saw pictures of copper enameling in a crafts encyclopedia when I was around 9, I've wanted to try it. I still remember clearly the piece that illustrated the article: it was a largish round pendant that had been covered with a layer of enamel and then had a lump and two threads added to make a design like this. Very 60s astro modern. The idea that you could actually take glass that was powdered or in thin threads or lumps and melt it to metal blew me away. This was glass like I'd never thought of it before and the process seemed somehow occult. I kept my fascination with enameling but never took a course and never tried it. Now, the Quick Fire promised to make all those childhood dreams come true, and more! Not only could I fire my pmc pieces, I could enamel them and even make fused glass pendants to go with them! I could turn out amazing multi-media art jewelry made completely from components that I had created, even down to the jump rings! (Never mind that I haven't actually started making my own jump rings in spite of the fact that I have a saw. It just seems so fiddly.) I was sold.

In retrospect, I think I was a little overly optimistic. Let me tell you something: enameling is not easy. There's some serious chemistry and physics going on in this process and, in spite of having several books to consult, I have not yet become one with the process. At first I couldn't get the powder to come out of the sifter at all. The books always show people doing it with this elegant one-handed tapping motion. All I managed to do was give myself a hand cramp. So I put the piece down to coat it and used two hands (something you're not supposed to do since then you have to somehow pick it up without disturbing the enamel powder). Naturally, when I tried to pick it up, I disturbed the enamel powder and had to re-coat the piece. Figuring out how hot and how long to fire the pieces should have been easy: every book has loads of charts. It wasn't. The first pieces I tried out had a variety of problems: uneven coating, pulling away from the edge, weird texture from being over-fired (or possibly under-fired). And sometimes the enamel just popped right off the metal as it cooled. (Note on the red piece my failed attempt to recreate that childhood memory.) I realized that I wasn't going to be making an fancy enamel jewelry anytime soon, so I put the supplies away and decided to focus on the work with pmc.

A couple of months later I was working with the pinch form in pmc: what you get when you pinch a ball of clay between the thumb and forefinger of both hands at the same time. (The necklace to the right has three pinches that I drilled and strung directly onto a wire cable. One is heavily oxidized, the other two are highly polished.) I fused several small ones together and liked the shape, but there was a hole in the middle that needed something. Then I remembered the container full of glass lumps packed away with all the other enameling supplies. I got them out, fired up the kiln, and stuck a chunk of blue glass into the middle of the cluster of pinches. I heated it just until the glass balled up, not long enough for it to spread out flat. It worked! The light shines through the back of the form so the blue glass looks positively illuminated. I've worn it a few times and fiddled with it a lot and the glass still hasn't fallen off. (The color of the silver in the picture is wrong - it's not actually brown. The color of the blue is right though.)

Not wanting to stretch my luck, I let another couple of months go by before trying enamel again. That was this morning. This time I had a couple of pieces that I'd created from scraps particularly to use with enamel. One is a little cup that I filled with large chunks of transparent red glass. The other is the oval pendant with blue and green swirls. As you can see, I'm still not making beautiful enamel jewelry, but I'm getting the hang of how hot and how long to fire the pieces. I'm definitely having better luck with enamel on fine silver than enamel on copper though. Just to see if I could do it, I tried enameling a blank oval copper pendant. I put a layer of clear enamel over the copper and added just a couple of chunks of green glass in different shades. It was quite pretty - except for the part where the enamel popped off the metal as it cooled. It doesn't matter. The Quick Fire kiln is amortizing rapidly and my childhood dream of enameling on copper is just around the corner. Really.