27 May 2010

Silver Dust Fusion!





This is a detail of a blackened silver brooch I made a while back. Its all hand fabricated, rather than a cast burn-out of a real plant... I snipped the buds out of really thin sheet with little scissors and then scored texture on them with a pin. They are about 5 to 8mm across. Can you see the fine, grainy texture in the stems and so on? ( click to enlarge) This is done by heating up the silver 'til the surface is just melting- flashing- then at that exact moment, sprinkling on silver dust! The dust fuses to the momentarily molten surface! Yikes! ( its tricky- you might melt the whole lot, the sheet is ≈0.1 mm thick dude!) ( just incase you thought I wasnt much good)
While I might be congratulating myself on this technical prowess, in Actuality, I havent been able to get any one to buy this piece, so it has been languishing in a box... in my workshop... for ages... maybe its too delicate? sigh.