Copper Spoon: Forging Technique

For our final project we forged a copper spoon out of this 3mm thick piece of copper. After I was thoroughly exhausted from finishing the second copper bowl, I took one look at this thick piece of copper and decided to leave it for the start of the next class. The instructor estimated that using a jeweller's hand saw and size 8 blades it should take us *only* 45 minutes to cut out the initial shape of the spoon. At that point I called it a night.

3mm thick piece of copper - ugh!

Cloisonne Pendant (cont'd)

Progressing slowly on the pendant. For the background I wet-packed two layers of Grass Green for shadowing and then added a layer of Peppermint Green which needs a second or third coating. The butterfly wings have two layers of Rose Pink but the colour isn't as bright as I expected. I also added a layer of Perriwinkle in the tips of the wings but after firing it seems to have blended with the pink. The body has an opaque yellow until I can think of what else to do with it.

Pendant after two layers

Almost done. I wet-packed several more layers into the cloisonne and the colours are becoming more vibrant. The cloisonne was beginning to curve from all of the firings so the instructor helped me flatten the piece by heating it up and then smashing it flat between two heavy metal plates immediately after removing it from the kiln. It didn't seem like a very sophisticated technique but was very effective. I was skeptical that the enamel wouldn't just crack off. In fact, it would have if we had smashed it even 5 seconds later and the piece had cooled down too much. 

After the cloisonne was flat it was easy to stone, which involves scrubbing it under running water with a piece of carborundum (silicon carbide). This removed excess enamel that was covering the cloisonne wire so now the butterfly outline looks like it is glowing. The cloisonne will undergo one last firing to maturity next week.

Agate Pendant

Ok change of plans. I had originally envisioned making some stud earrings for myself but decided at the last minute to make a pendant instead. The instructor cautioned that if I went with studs it would be very easy to break off the earring posts when I went to set the stones. Since you can't apply heat to metal after setting stones, I wouldn't have been able to re-solder the posts back on or do a whole lot with my finished cabochon settings if I had been so unfortunate.

I decided to switch gears and make a pendant using my two settings. If I had planned this properly I would have selected different sized stones, or different stones altogether, just to make it more interesting.  In the end

Here is the agate pendant with the cabochons set. Finishing this piece off proved to be much more frustrating and challenging than I had thought. The truly frustrating part was keeping the pendant fixed using the waxy resin. The problem was that the resin was considerably contaminated from being used in previous classes so it did a very poor job of holding the pieces in place while I set the stones.

After about the twelfth time of it coming loose (and having made little progress on setting the stones) the instructor gave me a pitch pot of which there was only one for the whole class. The tar in the pitch pot was unbelievably  more effective in securing the settings than the resin and I was able to complete my pendant with far less cursing!

Agate Earrings

After finishing up with the silver band ring I started on my final project in the Jewellery I course. We were learning about cabochons and bezel settings for our next ring project but I was leaning towards making a pair of stud earrings instead.  Here are the Botswana Agate cabochons I picked up along Queen street. In this photo I just finished hammering out the walls of the bezel setting using the bezel mandrel.

Copper Bowl II: Raising Technique

In our second project we started with a copper plate of the same diameter that was used for the first bowl. The raising technique compresses the copper and thickens the wall. The shape created above was made by hammering the outside of the bowl against a rounded T-stake (as opposed to hammering the inside of the bowl against a concave groove using the sinking techique). I'm finding that raising the bowl is a much slower and tiring process than sinking.  The technique is generally needed to create certain designs that can not be formed by sinking alone (or so I've been told).



Here is the bowl after another four hours of hammering and annealing. Raising is definitely more tiring than sinking. It's starting to look more like a bowl now.

 


Three final hours of hammering and the bowl is pretty much complete.



 

Here are photos of the two bowls together. The diameter of the first bowl using the sinking technique is 5.25 inches while the diameter of the second bowl using the raising technique is an inch smaller. I thought the difference would be a bit more dramatic but perhaps that's only the case when the instructor does it properly!

Left bowl formed by sinking, right bowl formed by raising

Cloisonne Pendant

Last night I started my cloisonne pendant which involved using tweezers and my fingers to tediously form delicate thin strips of copper into shape and then adhere them to the pendant using Klyr-fire. The piece was then put in the kiln and heated until the copper strips started to sink into the clear flux base coat (but not touching the actual copper base).

This was the largest piece of copper I had which is about 4cm x 4cm. When I drew the butterfly onto paper and shaped the copper strips on top of the sketch I forgot that I had previously drilled holes into the top of the pendant. When I transferred the copper strips to the actual pendant I couldn't find an arrangement that avoided overlapping the wings with either of the holes. Because forming the butterfly shape had been so tedious I decided not to tamper further with the design and will just need to work with what I have.

The next step will be to wet-pack the enamel powder into the different cells (rather than sifting which offers less control). The pendant has to be pickled in between each firing since the copper strips are bare and will develop firescale each time. Since the wire was not bent completely flat you can see some small gaps between the strip and the pendant base in the top right photo. Once I begin to add layers of enamel into the cells the gaps will disappear and the strips will be held much more solidly in place.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

My initial plan was to just put the pendant onto a simple string of pearls but after trying on the necklace a few times I decided I didn't like the way it hung. The pendant is quite thick and heavier then it ought to be so it created a sharp 'V' shape to the necklace instead of a nice curvature.

I switched gears and came up with a design that is a bit more elaborate. Due to the weight of the pendant I couldn't make the droops of pearls symmetric but ultimately I still liked the effect.