Enameling We Will Go ...

 I threw out a tease on my NKPDESIGNS Facebook Fanpage Saturday about how I had spent all day learning how to enamel in my friend's garage.  I had promised some pictures and so here they are.

My friend had recently been bitten by the enameling bug and when she offered to show me how to do it, of course I jumped at the chance.

I should have taken some pictures of the beginning of the process, but I forgot my camera (much the same way I forget which part of the house I leave my coffee cup sitting).

The process starts with cutting a piece of copper into a shape.  Next I filed the edges. I thought that would be tedious and awful, but it wasn't.

After the edges were smooth, I used a hammer and dapped on each piece a bit to raise the edges into a small curl and drilled a hole.

My friend had this cute little machine that screwed down into the copper and cut a clean hole that didn't need filing.  The next step was to put it into a pickling solution to clean it.  Then we applied the enamel with a nifty little sifter and turned on the flame.  She had trivets and we were able to enamel both sides of each piece.

Remember when we were kids and we would put glue on a piece of paper and then cover the paper with glitter, and then we would shake off the glitter and the glitter would stick to all the places the glue had been applied? 

Yeah, that's what we did here except we did it with a stamp and special stamping solution.  I forget what it is called (scratching my head). 

We also applied a transparent green into the corner and fired it. All the firing was done with a simple torch with MAPP gas.  My favorite enamel was a simple transparent clear and that's how I did most of the pieces.   This was such a fun afternoon. It was like taking a workshop.  I got there about 10:30 am and left around 5:30 pm.  Yesterday I spent the day shopping on the internet for all sorts of dapping and riveting tools. I've been wanting to play around with cold connections for a while and this enameling process is the perfect stepping stone to doing that.