This past month or so I’ve started learning vitreous enameling. I’ve always loved it and wondered how they DO that and it’s great to be able to at least see how some of the techniques are done. There’s so many different kinds of enamel too. Did you know that there are watercolor enamels (which you mix with water and paint onto the metal) and acrylic enamels, oil enamels, underglaze crayons (which you draw onto an enameled surface and then fire and then fire a transparent enamel over that), all kinds of little flower thingies that "bloom" when you fire them into these tiny flowers, it’s just too cool. I started out in beadweaving and I still love it, but then I migrated to jewelry and then to metalsmithing and now to glass. I guess I can’t stay still or something. Gotta keep learning (and making mistakes). I think this will be a life long thing, another one, since I keep finding things I love to do, the only thing I really disliked was a wax carving for jewelry casting class I took once, well, I took two of the classes and dropped out. It was really not what I wanted to do, I wanted to work directly with the metal. In my metalsmithing class there was a lady, Edna, who knew enameling and she did a demo one time and I got hooked from watching her, it’s taken me a few months to get the money free to start buying the actual enamel supplies, and it will have to be factored in to the budget, I’m afraid. Sigh. There are worse addictions.
April 16, 2009 at 5:26 pm |
I too am in the learning process. Campbell Folk School offers weekend classes every once in a while on enameling. They helped me alot figuring out what I was doing wrong.