enameling

A totally new project for me. You may be thinking that I am never going to finish any of the projects I already have going, but I assure you some of them may get done eventually. Anyway, our barony is going to have elections soon for a new baron and/or baroness. We have been working for the last 5 years without baronial coronets which can be passed down with the office. The current Baron and Baroness own their coronets. We needed to have a symbol of our barony which would outlast any specific officeholder. So I volunteered to make enameled medallions for the front of two coronets. I started working on them yesterday.

My laurel Ygraine, has been doing enamelling for quite a while now, and she does awesome work so I am leaning quite heavily on her tutelage. I spent about 4 hours working on the medallions yesterday which was just long enough to learn two things: 1. that I do not want to make a living making these things; 2. Ygraine has a great deal of patience. I suppose I also learned quite a bit about how to actually make a cloisonned piece of enameling.

We started by cleaning 3 small domed copper circles. then we applied some sticky stuff I cannot remember the name off to the back. After sifting some black powdered glass onto it, we turned them over and put some white on the front. The front did not need the sticky stuff since it was not going to be upside down. This is a picture of the copper discs with the powdered glass on them. They have not gone into the kiln yet. They only stay in the kiln for 2 minutes, during which time I was constantly keeping an eye on the temperature and adjusting the opening of the door to keep it steady.

This next picture shows the discs after they came out of the kiln. You can see the disc on the left is still hot. That gives it that brownish color. We let them cool down for a while. I don't quite remember how long, but then we get to talking anyway so it might have been a little longer than necessary. They were given 2 coats of white on the top.

Next I started to bend the little wire pieces which will keep the colors from mixing together on the final piece. Here is a picture of the disc after I have placed all the wires on it. There was probably about 1 and 1/2 hours between these two pictures. Bending all those little tiny leaves took quite a while. I believe I might have said some naughty words near the ends as yet another leave escaped from me to bounce around on the floor, or disappear in my lap. In the end I made 30 little tiny leaves. The heraldry of our barony is now visible on the front. A sperm whale surrounded by a laurel wreath. Oh yeah, that third copper disc we cleaned at the beginning was used at this point to press down on the top and make the wires of the whale conform to the shape of the dome.

Then I very carefully carried them back down stairs to put on one more coat of clear glass to hold all those little wires in place. I really breathed a sigh of relief (or releaf, ha ha) when they were all fastened down.

I am going to go back next week and start applying the colors. Eventually the wires will only be visible as tiny silver lines between the various colors. The whale will be black, the leaves green and the background white. I hope to get most of it done next week.