Showing posts with label enameled pennies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enameled pennies. Show all posts

Monday, November 12, 2012

Charm Reveal!

 Today is the reveal day for the Charm Swap. The theme this year is "laugh". The charms I created represent a little girls tea set - with the white and blue enamel on the penny creating an almost delft pattern when fired - and the single pearl on each penny represents the string of pearls she would wear to her dress up tea party. While the thought doesn't translate directly to laugh, the path from being happily at play to laugh is a natural one.

Using pennies, I sifted a layer of off-white on the penny, torch fired it, then fired a second layer of the white. Using a handmade template, I sifted a light layer of midnite blue on the penny and fired for the last time. 
 
 
 
Once the enameled pennies were cleaned and buffed I wrapped a freshwater pearl with some copper wire and added it to the copper jump ring- a little bit of dress up for the tea party.

 
I made 11 charms in all - 10 of which will be swapped and the 11th will be auctioned off for Beads of Courage - please check out the auction here and then go check out some charm eye candy! 
And a big thank you to Jennifer for hosting this swap.  It was my first and a great deal of fun.
 
 


Saturday, September 10, 2011

Autumn Colors (and some blues)

I was in the studio the other day with my nephew - we were fitting a necklace I had made for him - and he expressed an interest in trying his hand at torch firing some enamel on pennies.  After a short instruction period, he picked out a color (opaque orange - my personal nemesis for some reason), cleaned the pennies and proceeded to torch fire.  It was a resounding success.
His very first penny - very first attempt at torch firing enamel, and he's a natural!!!

The color got me to thinking about autumn and how quickly it's sneaking up on us - so I wanted to do some pennies that would look good in a "fall" jewelry piece. I have been wanting to layer colors in a staggered way - not the way I have been but in such a way that the layered colors will show on their own - and this is what I came up with:

And then because I loved how the pennies were turning out, I had to try a couple different colors..........