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Showing posts with the label jewellery techniques

Creating A Matt Finish On Torch Enamel Jewellery

Being a jewellery maker I love watching jewellery making videos, and especially learning new tricks that I can use on a technique I'm familiar with. A video I watched recently was  Further Explorations In Jewelry Enameling: Kiln Fired Liquid Enamel And Sgraffito With Susan Lenart Kazmer . I don't enamel with a kiln but the techniques covered are still relevent for torch enamelling. It's a great video full of new ideas and Susan Lenart Kazmer is a likeable teacher. One of the techniques covered was giving enamel a matt finish using Etchall etching cream. I've seen how lovely enamel jewellery looks with a matt finish and have always been intrigued with it and have thought of trying it myself in the past. The video showed how easy it was to achieve so I went on the cyber hunt for Etchall cream. I found some on ebay for £34 and another etching cream called Armour Etch. I really wanted the Etchall brand so started Googling it until I found some at a much more sensibl...

Zentangle Etching On Copper

I've never tried doing Zentangle designs, I don't think I'm good enough at drawing if I'm honest, but I do love Zentangle patterns! A jewellery maker friend of mine recently very kindly sent me two Deborah Read zentangle stamps (thanks Jill!) I thought I'd use them for etching and decided to try a different way of suspending the copper sheet in the ferric chloride this time too. I normally stick the copper pieces to packing tape and suspend the tape across my etching dish so the copper is immersed in the etching liquid as shown in the photo below..... This works fine for small pieces but anything larger than about 1.5 inches is too heavy for the tape and pulls it down so it ends up touching the bottom of the dish. It also means the copper pieces start to peel off the tape after about an hour which is not good news if you want to do a deep etch! The answer would be to get a deeper dish and more ferric chloride but I thought I'd try hanging the co...