rituals
…..will be practicing letting go and clearing out. I want to scrape way down below the surface to make room for the really large parts of me to be able to easily flow in……..and family gathering here soon.
Again thank-you all for all your comments! Will return soon.
May all flow well, Jane
well….sort of a miracle………
…..the spinach in the refrigerator made itself into a spring bird with a bit of its new nest in its mouth.
soon to be……again
etching and enamel
This is a 20 gauge disc of red brass that measures 1 and 3/8″. When etching with ferric chloride you can sweat solder on sterling or fine silver and use it as a ‘resist’ because the ferric will not etch silver. Because you will be submerging the piece in the ferric make sure you have a good tight sweat solder. In this sample I did not put any kind of resist on the red brass area except to put magic marker on the edges. The lines that you see on the red brass are done by the ferric. Obviously you could put a resist on it if that was your design intent. I sweat soldered ( with hard) fine silver to the red brass so I could put enamel on it. I used a transparent blue and stoned it a bit after it was fired. More dimension could be built up here with the silver and enameled too. After the silver was soldered on the surface was textured with a scribe and hammer ( although you could solder on a piece that had been textured already in the mill etc) and then the whole piece was dapped a bit.
I found some small plastic trays that were divided. The dividers were sealed to the bottom so I could use each little section for etching a small piece without using a lot of ferric. I used clear tape to suspend the piece in the ferric. Great for little tests like this.
I think I would like a bigger piece with a delicate silver tree on red brass with certain areas enameled and maybe incorporate some of the steel wire shapes in the enamel ( see tutorials on my website janecather.com)
everybody has something to say
