Otto Frei’s main office and warehouse in Oakland, CA
A fun place to visit
Where more tools can be found…
Shot in a Bag
Today I sewed up some old shotgun shot into a piece of an old denim jeans leg. The new ‘pillow’ will be nice to brace things on when I need something that gives.
On the Bench
On the bench today are some earrings in process; I’m working on the silver to fit white topaz and garnet stones with different dimensions. Also on the bench is the fork tine I need to shape in order to set the stones. And at the top of the picture are some pieces of silver I cast years ago. Interesting pieces; I found them while looking for an opal triplet I created years ago.
I wonder what I had in mind for them – if anything. I might have just been playing with the pink sheet wax to see what I could do. Now I have an idea for them to be used in a bracelet. The two odd pieces out will probably become earrings.
Patina Experiment Results
As promised…here are some photos of the brass bracelet and copper piece I was experimenting with in October.
I left the brass bracelet in the fuming container much longer than recommended, and the colored patina you saw in October washed off. Now that I’ve pushed that patina past it’s time limit, I’ll revisit it again someday and see how long to fume it so the blue greens stay.
The moist sorrel washed off, leaving nice colors on the copper sample.
My favorite new copper patina is shown below on flat and hammered copper samples. The fuming recipe is comprised of sea salt, cream of tartar, and vinegar.
You can read more about the cream of tartar patina in my “Accessible Patinas” article in the upcoming zine which Catherine Witherell and Deryn Mentock are publishing in January 2009.
Another fun result from the copper patina experiments is a mottled blue / green from sal ammoniac and tobacco. The results lead me to wonder what would happen if I ground up the tobacco even finer before this immersion process.
Here’s a closeup look at the flat piece after rinsing
Fave New Book
I’m loving the book “The Colouring, Bronzing and Patination of Metals” by Richard Hughes and Michael Rowe. (Click on the title to see the book.)
Since I’m more of a “thanks for the suggested starting point” type of person, for the most part I’m using the endless patina recipes in the book as a very nice place to start. Here are a couple of the things I’ve learned….
When you boil sorrel in water to obtain the oxalic acid, and use the water with some of the now sad looking sorrel, you’ll see the copper in this type of blue mess after about a week:
Stay tuned for more photos of what the pieces look like after they’ve been cleaned off.
Three Pomegranates
I’m pretty pleased with the pomegranates that rose out of the 22 gauge copper sheet brought to my first Chasing and Repousse’ workshop! Davide Biggazzi is an excellent instructor, and yes – he did a small bit of the work on this piece. Nothing like working directly on the piece to show the technique when moving along in the steps of the process….
Starting with this outline from Davide, I punched and punched the dots around the tracing paper to transfer the image to the copper sheet.
We worked the back of the piece (repousse’), then switched to the front of the piece to refine the design (chasing). A couple minor touchups were then made on the back and front (by Davide) once the piece had been removed from the pitch bowl.
Nice! -and- Patinas
Emanuela Duca has some very nice pieces of jewelry on her site. Clicking the title of this post will take you to her site.
Back to work! For the upcoming SFBASCG meeting in Los Gatos, I’m preparing a patina demo on brass, copper, and silver. I enjoyed experimenting with different materials last year when I gave a patination demo for the Metal Arts Association of Silicon Valley.
Results of last years demo are shown below. The tobacco patina was interesting because the coarse and fine tobacco resulted in very different patinas. The friend that went with me to the smoke shop to purchase pipe tobacco for the demo was just asking me about the tobacoo patina the other day. She finds it amusing and interesting. Aren’t we artists odd?!
