Julie Higgins
In her tutorial Betty showed us how to enamel on copper foil. That’s really all she did - except that the method opened up so many possibilities for us. Actually, I had already done a regional workshop with Betty on the same subject - I had gone home thoroughly enthusiastic, but I forgot one simple but essential rule - the front of the piece (on the back you brush on liquid flux or white or whatever, let it dry and then do the front and fire both sides at the same time) should be gummed before the enamel is sifted. Yup - that's the one I forgot. So, the ridges I had created on the copper just burned out. Fine, if that's what you wanted, but it wasn't in my case. So, now that particular lapse of memory had been corrected it was plain sailing.
Dorothy Cockrell
Following the Masterclass given at the York conference in 1999, I attended a short course at the Jewellery School in Birmingham on PMC. Fascinating stuff- metal working skills were not required but experience of handling pastry and icing certainly helped.
At home, I found my Flamefast 1000 kiln handled the sintering* very well and the next step was to try enamelling.
The leaflet which accompanies the raw material suggests enamel can be mixed with it before sintering. Nothing is ever as simple as the written instructions lead one to believe! First, I tried putting a lump of opalescent blue enamel on a piece of the clay and then sintering it. It turned a deep brown, soaking the clay and sitting in a shiny lump on top.
One of the interesting displays at the Leicester Conference was a selection of samples of enamel with dichroic glass made by May Yarker. Also on display was her 'mobile', glowing with blues, greens and showing flashes of red and purple from the pieces of dichroic glass she had fired onto it.
Dennis Davies
Recently I required rectangular and square section wires for cloisonné panels. The wires formed an integral part of the design, but the standard and freely available wires were unsuitable. There seemed no hope in extracting small quantities from commercial drawing sources, so it seemed I would have to make my own from circular section wire of which I had plenty.
Professional advice was to obtain a small hand operated rolling-mill or a drawing die. Enquiries showed the former to be horribly expensive and the latter, although but a tenth of the cost, did not have the section sizes I required.
In surveying the problem, the complexities seemed rather large, but I have always believed in simple solutions to large problems. Aided by many years’ experience in the working of copper, I believed the solution lay in a compromise between rolling-mill and drawing die. The 'rolls' would be fixed solid cylinders and the wire would be drawn by hand through thus exerting a thinning effect.
Julie Higgins
There are so many ways for a newcomer to begin that it is difficult to remember all of the necessary things to be noted before starting, but I'll try.
Some of the important things to remember are that the piece of metal must be absolutely clean. This doesn't necessarily mean pickling in either acid or a combination of salt and vinegar (which I prefer - it's slower than acid, but safer and I'm not free enough from clumsiness to swear that I'll never tip over a bowl of liquid), but usually, especially with copper, rubbing well over the surface to be enamelled with a rough abrasive sponge will do the trick.