Kalaya Steede

Picture by Barbara Lewis Hurry time is running out!  I would love to win these beauties.  If you want to join in the fun and see how lucky you are, go to Barbara Lewis's blog  Painting With Fire  and follow the instruction. Deadline is May 31st.  Good luck!   On another note Barbara is coming out with a new book called Torch-Fired Enamel Jewelry: A Workshop in Painting with Fire due out in September.  A must for your library of goodies!   Namaste Kalaya

A friend had commissioned me to make some earrings out of brass by reclaiming some turquoise from another pair of earrings she had.  I haven't used any brass but I'm sure there is some in the studio waiting to come alive.  Yup, here is some textured brass that came from Thomas Mann's I/O Gallery on Magazine St.  I cut out a disc shape and torched it to calm the shininess of it all.   I had first used liver of sulfur but the color came out this pretty blue (not the color I was hoping for) so I torched it and this is the color it came out.  It brought some of the copper to the surface giving it an antique look.   Voila!  The finished piece.  Now for the torched enamel ear wires.  This was experiment no. 2.  Experiment 1 was Fall 2010 in metalsmith class.  The enamel kept bouncing off.  But now I got some advice from Barbara Lewis and her group of  pyromaniac artists .  The list is a great place for techni...