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Parent Category: Technical Articles from Journal Back Copies

Category: Technical Articles 2005

The wisdom and the warnings

Kathleen Kay

Looking back over my years as an enameller, I would find it hard to guess how many times I have either volunteered or been bullied into demonstrating, for several hours continuously, at country shows, fetes, living museums, art galleries and craft shows.

These are not the sort of events where the visiting public want to watch tiny wires being beautifully formed and placed, gum drying or the precise laying of prepared enamel grains. The most exciting moment of a demonstration, which can draw a crowd three or four deep to watch, silently, is the opening of a kiln door to a bright orange heat, and that funny woman using a bent wire with a wooden handle (so that she doesn't electrocute herself of course) aiming at something ..... somewhere in the kiln. At that moment, the firing chamber, together with the stilt and the carefully placed enamel, is so bright that only experience, confidence and a precise recollection of where the areas of colour have been placed, allow for that gentle touch and the brief, fluid movement drawing through the surface pattern as the design had intended ..... or it could just be plain good luck.

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