Thursday, May 3, 2012

Another chance to play with enamels today..



I have been struggling with keeping the lovely blackness at the edges, it looks fine then flakes off the very edges (I guess that's the firescale or very thin enamel), then I figured that maybe it's better for the edge not to have a depth, you can see the copper edge on the bottom flowers where I didn't do anything to the edge after cutting, on the flowers behind and the leaves I cut then hammered the edges lightly so they go to a point which I suppose gets a lot hotter and gave a better finish?
I also discovered that making copper headpins is different to silver, they look fine but if you grab the balled up end with finger and thumb and pull, they often come right off. It seems better if you heat the wire more before allowing it to ball, then you get the sort of balled up end that looks more like a raindrop coming off than a perfect sphere, these seemed to be stronger.
I'm now feeling confident enough with the copper to move on to playing with silver shapes and headpins, I'm especially after the pale transparent blues and greens and maybe even some surface design showing through..