Custom Pieces

I've got stuff all over the place and in every stage of completion, as well as a bunch of pieces that were finished ages ago, but I haven't yet listed.  Well, today is the day I took pictures of a bunch and will be listing them in my Etsy Shop over the next few days.  There are also some that won't make it to my shop because they are custom orders, but I still want to share those.

I was very pleased and honored to be asked to make earrings for a bride to wear in her wedding in July.  She wanted a certain color stone and I couldn't match it exactly.  She and her mom saw me enameling and decided to use a color I happened to be enameling with, which was a perfect match.  I rounded up the enameling so that it would look like a cabochon.

I have also made a couple of brooches for a shop in Bar Harbor that is doing a special brooch exhibit.  Both are made with texture sheets, using my own drawings.  The first is called "Make a Wish".  The fuzzies on the dandelion are slightly raised and secured with resin.

The second is a reversible pin.  The dangle part has a swirly tree design on one side and a stylized fiddlehead on the other.  That part can be removed and turned over to hang on the pin portion.  I suppose it could also be worn on a chain.

I used a jewelry lacquer to seal the patina for the first time on this piece.  I've been afraid to because every other thing I tried ended up changing the color of the patina.  This one didn't, though.  I didn't spray it, but actually sprayed a pool of the lacquer onto a piece of plastic and "painted" it into the depression where the lacquer is.

If you would like to see more photos of the two pins, you can see those here.

Higher Grounds Artisan & Vintage Market

I know summer has started when I announce my first show of the year.  I'm looking forward to this one, which sounds like a lot of fun.

Higher Grounds Artisan & Vintage Market

Sunday, June 19th

10:00 am to 3:00 pm

119 Water Street, Hallowell

For more information visit:   http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=149676535104975

Hope to see you there!

Serendipity and More Adventures in Bronze and Copper Clay

My last experiment combining copper and bronze clay didn't go very well, but I tried again and this time I had success!  And I learned some things along the way. 

First, I'll share a piece that's just bronze clay.  When I take them out of the kiln, they have some fire scale and are a pinkish color.  I have been polishing them with my flex shaft and some 3M Radial Disks.  I decided to leave a bit of the pinkish color in the texture on this piece.

These pieces are to be earrings for myself.  I wanted to make something that had all three metals I've been using, so I used one of my favorite textures (a shell with worm holes in it) and cut circles of the same size.  I wanted to show the difference in shrinkage of the clays.  It's kind of hard to see here, but the copper is considerably smaller.  BronzClay only shrinks about 10 percent while CopprClay shrinks 15 to 20 percent.  I had misread and thought they both shrunk only 10 percent, which may have been part of the problem in my last firing.

 

This piece is all bronze, but it I wanted to show what happened to it.  I had it sitting on top of the plaid flower pendant I showed in my last post and it picked up a cool orangy patina.  I decided to polish off the dragonfly and leave the rest.  The picture doesn't show that there are some blues in the patina, too.  I will apply a lacquer to preserve this patina.

 

Here is another version of the dragonfly pendant, which is made with a mold I got at Cool Tools.  Here is my first bronze/copper combination.  I filled the dragonfly depressions in the mold with copper and let it dry.  It took a while to clean up around the dragonfly so there was no other copper in the mold.  I then pressed in a thick slab of copper clay and let that dry.  It came out pretty good, I think, except for a couple of cracks in the wings.  You can see the difference in the colors fairly well in this photo. 

 

This next set is to be a necklace, bracelet and earrings.  It's hard to see the color difference, but it's there.  Here I made bronze pieces with this design that is vaguely Japanese to me.  I let those dry and then pressed them into thick slabs of copper clay and cut out frames.  When I made these, I still thought that copper and bronze shrunk at the same rate.  Another bit of serendipity here:  The copper shrunk more, but instead of cracking, it domed the pieces, something that's a bit hard to see here.

 

I had some bits of both clays left and decided to see what would happen if I combined them.  I made a flat piece of each, put one on top of the other, rolled them up, sliced the rolls and rolled out the pieces.  It gave the clay a Mokume Gane kind of look.  It worked and does show up on the fired pieces, except not as much as I would have liked, so I patinaed them with Baldwin's Patina, so the copper shows up a bit more.  I will try this technique again now that I know a bit more about it and that it works.  One of the keys is not to mix the clays too much or you lose the marbling.

 

Lastly, I will leave you with a photo of the necklace I made with the flower and plaid piece that I turned green with Baldwin's Patina.  I was lucky to find these frosted glass beads that matched perfectly.