Well, kind of new. I bought everything to do copper enameling over two years ago and I’m finally getting around to doing it. Here are my first few pieces – still to be made into jewelry.
These are the first ones I did. The holey piece had more holes in it but I accidentally covered some up when I put enamel on the piece. It’s too hard to drill the enamel out so I just added another color on top of it to help hide the covered holes. I used a kiln to fire these pieces.
These pieces I torch fired, kind of. All the rippled round pieces were done with a torch and dipped in enamel. The two rectangles, I put one layer of color on in the kiln, then added clear with a torch. The copper wasn’t entirely covered up so some of the red on the sides shows through.
This piece was a test. First, it’s not solid copper. Not sure what’s in the middle but it was good enough to withstand the heat. I torch enameled this one using a layer of enamel, then I dipped it into glass frit – which is little chips of colored glass. This one went through an abuse test to see if there was any kind of incompatibility between the enamel and glass. I dropped it several times, stepped on it, and then banged the edges on concrete. The concrete did chip the enamel off the edges but I suspect any enameled piece would do the same thing. What I was looking for was a whole piece of enamel coming off and it didn’t. Yeah!!