Introduction to Enameling

I started my enameling course at George Brown recently and I'm finding that it can be quite intimidating since you're dealing with powdered glass and a kiln at 1500 deg Celsius, and the difference between under-firing and over-firing a piece can be a matter of 5 seconds. The fact that you are supposed to avoid opening the kiln door too often (so as to prevent the temperature from dropping) makes it all the more challenging.

Creating various samples to play with colours

Samples. Above are some samples that I created in our first two classes. Each colour has its own characteristics and requires different firing times to reach sugar-fire, orange-peel, maturity, or clarity. There's no golden rule about how long each colour needs to be fired so the best way to get a handle on things is to try out some samples.

Layers.  The middle photo shows a project that gave me more practice with firing. The point of this project was to end up with five distinct layers of enamel (one for each semi-circle plus a base coat). It was discovered that the light blue (almost white) colour at the front of the piece was much harder than the other colours I selected. Even though it was the second layer to go on, the remaining three colours reached maturity while the light blue stayed at orange-peel.

Flower.  For this flower stencil piece the light blue and purple layers have been fired to maturity but the bright orange petals are still at sugar coat so the piece could stand to be fired one final time to get a completely smooth finish.

Lost Wax Casting: Carved Stone Ring

Here's my first completely independent project that I made at home in prep for my casting class. I was under the gun to get something ready to create a plaster mold of so I looked up various designs online for inspiration. I didn't want to choose anything too difficult since I'm lacking in tools at home and I thought there was a lot of forgiveness in this design. If I screwed up a crack here or there, well who could tell anyway right?

I was nervous to make my first casting since it's a fine balance between the water and investment powder that needs to go into the mixture.  In the burnout stage of the casting process the wax model is melted away and I certainly didn't want to lose my wax model for nothing.  Luckily the mixture was just right and I was able to melt down 20 grams of sterling silver for this ring.


The ring itself is roughly 13.5 grams of silver (pretty heavy for your finger) but the added silver was required to account for the sprue (wax branch that creates the channel to inject molten silver) and for shrinkage.

I heated the silver beads using a large torch after they were added to a container in the centrifuge, and once the silver became molten the torch was removed and the lid of the centrifuge was immediately closed, triggering the motor to start. The spinning process was about 2 minutes.

After letting the plaster mold and casted silver piece cool for another 6 minutes the cannister was plunged into a bucket of water and swirled around dissolving the plaster. I retrieved the oxidized ring which was a gunmetal grey and threw it in the pickle solution (sulfuric acid). After about 10 minutes and some scrubbing with baking soda it came out gleaming white from the thin layer of pure silver coating the surface.

 I was surprised how much the material looked like plaster rather than silver but was told that a little light polishing would get rid of the the fine silver and reveal the familiar colour just below the surface.  I sawed off the sprue and filed down the ring to smooth out the edge.  I'll wait until next week to start the polishing.

Carved stone ring with fine-silver coating

Lost Wax Casting

I started my casting course at George Brown on Monday nights and it's looking to be a fun course.  In the lost wax casting process the metal piece (jewellery, ornament, or other) is cast from a wax sculpture or model. Typically the jewellery created using investment casting takes on a more organic or three-dimensional shape which may be too difficult or wasteful to create by working with metal directly.  I was excited to take this course at George Brown because working with wax was going to be very different than working with metal and I thought it would give me more freedom to design my pieces.



First things first, I had to learn the basics of filing wax which was tedious for someone as impatient as I am!  We started with a simple band ring, then moved onto a man's signet ring which was a bit more tricky.  The wax was much easier on my hands than metal is but I did have to wear a mask to prevent inhaling too much of the filings.