I admit this piece isn’t all that exciting. It was an experiment to see if I could reduce the enamel to bring out some of the oxides. It did partially but some people get all these unexpected colors when they do it. Some colors work better than others but I’ve seen some pieces with with that look stunning. This one, not so much.
I’m having a lot of fun playing with torch firing enamels onto copper. The enameled tube ends have been flared out using my rivet press. The other beads are tubing that I wrapped wire around. The ends are balled up copper and sterling silver. I was able to fuse the sterling silver onto the copper. It’s strung on thick brown leather with copper end caps.
I quickly threw this bracelet together to see what it would look like. I should have used a thicker piece of copper and made it a bit longer. It didn’t have much texture to it so I added the raised dots. The beads are enameled by torch firing them.
This bracelet was fun and I’ll probably make a few more.
I got several pieces enameled and used them for these earrings:
And still making tiny beads except not a pair of them. Just a random set of small beads. I made this bracelet out of some of them. I didn’t realize it would look so Halloween-y.
I was hoping it would be more red but not really dark red. Oh well….
I finally got these done today. I had issues because the wire I used to attach the enameled pieces to the chain was a bit too thick. I’ll try them again (maybe) with thinner wire.
They are a dark red, it’s hard to tell. They dangle about 2 inches.
I enameled these two disks last night and quickly threw these earrings together. I think they turned out kind of cute. The picture is deceiving. They are really tiny and petite.
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!!
Mewkittie Creations 