Navah Langmeyer and Belinda Coyne

The Barbara Minor copper mesh enamelling workshop was incredibly well organized, interesting, and fun! Barbara started with a wide array of examples, showing the results one can obtain with different wire gauges, mesh size and manipulation techniques. These ranged from rigid, structured, and sturdy objects like boxes and other flat-sided shapes to very flexible, organic, and delicate objects. A larger mesh with lower-gauge wires produces more rigid structures and is harder to manipulate without tools, while a finer mesh with higher-gauge wires acts more like fabric and is easy to stretch and distort by hand.

Barbara went through the process of cutting a square, finishing the edges in various ways (twisting pairs of wire ends, bending individual wire ends, folding edges over like a seam), and pinching and stretching wires to create lace-like patterns in the mesh. This can be done with lots of tools, and requires periodic annealing. It's pretty intuitive, but takes some attention and balancing of how changes in one area affect other areas as wires are pulled and pushed. She also demonstrated ways of manipulating the mesh to create ridges, folds, curves, corrugated circles, gathers, and lots of other shapes; the variety really seems to be endless. Using pliers (particularly confirming pliers, which seem to be available at vast expense only in the U.S. from Rio Grande), edges of blocks and tables, hammers, stakes, and other tools assists with this shaping and getting sharp folds, if desired.

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