Saturday, August 22, 2009

A bunch of Bronze Clay Items and My First Package of PMC Standard

Went to Hadar's last night and used an entire package (20g) of silver clay. How nerve-wracking!

I made a "quilted" pendant and five leaves.



I still need to file, add a tube bail to the pendant, and drill holes in the leaves. Then I'll fire it all and hope for the best.

I have to leave the apartment later this afternoon (to take Monica to hockey), so I really have a lot to do this morning. I hope I have time to finish my silver and get it fired before I have to leave.

The rest of today's post is copied from my Laura Bracken blog, so if you've already read it there, no need to continue.

So here’s a mish-mash of results, in no particular order…

Sorry for the blurry photo. Can’t remember if I mentioned it out loud or not, but I wanted to revisit the charms I made in this bracelet…



… but this time polish them up. Here’s how they are straight from the kiln, except for the top one which I’ve begun to polish…



And here are the tube ribbons out of the kiln (the top two are semi-polished).



I started to run out of some of my dremel bits. I am on my last mini fiber wheel (will have to stock up on those). So I tried a different tool in its place…



… I’m afraid I have no clue what this tool is for. It did absolutely nothing on my metal clay. Ha!

Now here are two bronze bead caps straight out of the kiln.



Then I polished them, one more than the other. I prefer the one on the left (semi-polished), but again I don’t know how long the natural kiln patina will last.



Here’s Mr. Peacock right out of the kiln. His eyeball fell out. I’m guessing that once the cork form burnt out there was nothing to hold the eye in so now it’s mixed in with my charcoal (needle in a haystack).



Here’s Mr. Peacock after a first go-over with a couple dremel bits.



Here’s a leaf pendant. I made this at Hadar’s class last week while I was waiting for my charms to dry.



Here are two charms (I made these when I made Monica’s earrings... did I ever get a photo of those?) straight from the kiln.



I have since polished them up and put them on chains as small pendants. I’ll photo and list them, along with another copper/bronze piece that I’ve apparently forgotten to take a quick photo of.

2 comments:

  1. Can you please e-mail me and tell me where you buy your dremel mini fiber wheels and what exactly they're called? I've been trying EVERYTHING (three different pickles, the worthless dremel head like in your picture, re-firing and quenching...) to remove the gross firescale layer from my fired bronze and copper. The only thing that gets it off is a sanding dremel, and I end up removing all my texture before I get them clean. It's driving me crazy!

    aliasjanedoe@hotmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. how long did the kiln patina last ?
    judy@clayplay.net

    ReplyDelete